BX  5995  .D8  A3  1912 
Dubose,  William  Porcher, 

1836-1918. 
Turning  points  in  my  life 


TURNING  POINTS  IN  MY  LIFE 


WORKS  BY 

W.  PORCHER  DUBOSE,  M.A.,  S.T.D. 


The  Gospel  in  the  Gospels 
Crown  8vo. 

The  Gospel  According  to  Saint  Paul 
Crown  8vo. 

The  Soteriology  of  the  New  Testament 
Crown  8vo. 

High  Priesthood  and  Sacrifice 
Crown  Svo. 

The  Reason  of  Life 
Crown  Svo. 


LONGMANS,    GREEN,   AND    CO. 


The  Ecumenical  Councils 

Crown  Svo. 
New   York:   CHARLES   SCRIBNER'S    SONS 


TURNING  POINTS 
IN  MY  LIFE 


BY 
William  Porcher  DuBose,  m.a.,  s.t.d. 

AUTHOR   OF   "the   SOTERIOLOGY  OF   THE   NEW   TESTA- 
MENT," "the  gospel  in  the  gospels,"  "the 

GOSPEL  ACCORDING   TO   ST.    PAUL,"    "HIGH 

PRIESTHOOD   AND   SACRIFICE,"    "  THE 

REASON   OF   LIFE,"   ETC.,   ETC. 


OCT!  4  19 


LONGMANS,    GREEN,    AND   CO. 

FOURTH  AVENUE  &  30TH   STREET.  NEW  YORK 
LONDON,  BOMBAY,  AND   CALCUTTA 

1912 


COPYRIGHT,    1912,    BY 
LONGMANS,    GREEN,    AND    CO. 


THH'PLIMPTON'PRBSS 

[  W  •  D  •  O  ] 
NORWOOD- MASS  'U'S  "A 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Introduction 1 

CHAPTER 

I.   Early  Spiritual  Life 13 

II.    War  Experiences 33 

III.  Church  Influences 53 

IV.  Catholic  Principles 75 

V.   The  Theology  of  the  Child  ....  95 

VI.   Sermon  at  Sewanee 113 

VII.   Liberty  and  Authority  in  Christian  Truth  125 


Turning  Points  in  My  Life 


INTRODUCTION 

TOURING  the  first  week  of  August,  1911, 
^^  there  was  held  at  Sewanee,  Tennessee, 
a  reunion  of  those  who  had  been  my  students 
during  the  thirty-six  years  of  my  active  con- 
nection with  the  University  of  the  South.  This 
event  had  been  for  some  time  contemplated, 
and  came  at  a  most  propitious  moment.  Con- 
ditions could  not  well  have  conspired  to  make 
it  more  thoroughly  successful  and  enjoyable. 

The  exercises  consisted  of  papers  read  by  me 
in  the  morning;  services,  with  brief  addresses 
by  others,  in  the  afternoon;  and  public  general 
conferences  in  the  evenings  —  with  private 
and  social  functions  between. 

And  now  I  am  requested,  in  publishing  the 
several  papers  which  were  my  contribution  to 
the  reunion,  to  accompany  it  with  some  explan- 
atory account  of  the  occasion  itself  —  with 
three  objects  in  view.  In  the  first  place,  the 
volume  is  desired  as  an  interpretation  and  a 
memorial  of  the  reunion  for  the  use  of  those 

1 


2  Introduction 

who  took  part  in  it,  and  who  wish  to  preserve 
and  perpetuate  the  memory  and  the  benefits 
of  it.  In  the  second  place,  it  is  wanted  as  a 
record  and  report  of  the  week  for  the  many 
more,  equally  interested  and  concerned  in  it, 
who  were  prevented  by  many  and  various 
reasons  from  being  with  us  at  Sewanee.  And 
in  the  third  place,  there  are  friends,  of  my 
own,  known  and  unknown,  of  Sewanee,  of  the 
Church,  of  the  ideals  and  verities  for  which 
we  all  stand,  who  are  of  neither  of  the  above 
classes,  and  who  may  take  an  interest  in  the 
more  familiar  and  informal  treatment  of  the 
matters  with  which  our  conferences  were  con- 
cerned. For  these  several  purposes  I  am  de- 
sired to  preserve  the  personal,  autobiographical 
and  historical,  features  of  the  report  and  to 
retain  as  much  of  a  concrete  coloring  as  pos- 
sible. I  am  willing  to  do  this  chiefly  because 
in  the  reunion  there  has  been  so  much  of  a  one- 
sided expression  of  obligation  to  myself,  that  it 
is  necessary  to  avail  myself  of  the  opportunity 
to  say  something  of  my  own  obligations  in  re- 
turn. Let  me  speak  then,  first,  a  little  of  the 
reunionists,  both  in  will  and  deed,  of  my  past  re- 
lations with  them,  and  of  what  I  owe  to  them. 
Passing  at  the  age  of  sixteen  from  school  to 


Introduction  3 

college  (the  Military  College  of  South  Caro- 
lina), at  twenty  to  university  (of  Virginia),  at 
twenty-three  into  seminary  life  for  only  a  year 
and  a  half,  and  out  of  this  into  active  service 
in  war,  after  which  came  a  half  dozen  years 
of  reconstruction  life  and  ministry — I  came 
finally  to  Sewanee  with  very  little  of  either 
technical  or  practical  training  and  preparation 
for  my  duties  as:  (1)  Chaplain,  (2)  Professor 
of  Ethics,  and  (3)  Developer,  as  opportunity 
and  material  might  be  furnished,  of  a  pro- 
jected Theological  Department.  For  several 
years  I  discharged,  as  I  could,  all  these  func- 
tions, as  much  making  and  shaping  myself,  or 
being  shaped  and  made,  through  them,  as 
performing  these  tasks  upon  others.  Many  of 
those  under  me  were  older  young  men  whose 
education  had  been  delayed  by  the  disorganized 
conditions  of  the  war  and  after.  Moreover, 
the  times  had  bred  among  them  a  spirit  of 
individualism  and  independence,  with  more  or 
less  of  fearlessness  and  lawlessness.  Finally, 
the  institution  was  new,  the  material  unshaped, 
the  whole  principle  and  system  of  the  place 
undeveloped.  Through  my  several  offices  I 
had  much  to  do,  in  a  personal  way,  with  the 
discipline  and  life  of  those  days;   I  was  chiefly 


4  Introduction 

entrusted  with  the  evolution  of  an  order  of 
Gownsmen,  through  whom  the  desired  spirit 
and  tone  and  character  were  to  be  impressed 
by  degrees  upon  the  whole  body  of  students. 
Much  of  this  work  was  done  along  with  and 
through  my  classes,  which  thus  became  my 
main  medium  of  influence  in  the  University. 
Over  us  all  we  were  fortunate  at  the  beginning 
in  having  the  clear  head,  the  wise  spirit  and 
temper,  and  the  strong  hand  of  our  then  Vice 
Chancellor,  General  Gorgas,  who  had  been 
considered  the  best  organizing  member  of  the 
Confederate  Department  of  War. 

I  mention  these  details,  chiefly  to  account 
for  the  peculiarly  close  and  personal  relations 
which  from  the  beginning  grew  up  between 
myself  and  my  immediate  students,  those  of 
my  own  classes.  I  was  in  fact  more  one  of  them 
than  one  merely  over  them.  I  was  finding  and 
making  myself  in  and  with  and  through  and 
by,  as  well  as  upon,  them.  I  claimed  nothing, 
exacted  nothing,  imposed  nothing  of  or  for 
myself,  and  they  both  took  more  from  me  and 
gave  me  more  than  I  ever  asked  or  deserved. 
In  addition  to  all  this,  the  isolated  location  of 
Sewanee,  the  high  quality  of  its  limited  com- 
munity, the  social  unity,  warmth,  and  charm 


Introduction  5 

of  the  place  and  the  life,  conduced  in  a  singular 
way  to  the  cultivation  of  personal  relations  and 
ties,  as  well  between  students  and  professors  as 
among  all  others.  So  from  those  early  days 
I  became  in  many  instances  the  intimate  per- 
sonal friend  of  many  of  my  students,  their  con- 
fidant in  love,  their  counsellor  in  difficulty  or 
trouble,  their  companion,  so  far  as  presence 
and  sympathy  could  go,  in  amusement  or  play. 
Of  course,  with  age  and  with  engrossing  care 
and  occupations,  the  outward  exercise  and 
expression  of  all  these  ties  grew  less,  but  I  am 
grateful  to  feel  that  to  the  last  I  am  trusted 
and  treated  as  one  whose  heart  is  the  same. 

It  was  some  years  before  my  ethical  teaching 
began  to  take  a  shape  and  develop  a  system  of 
its  own.  My  method  of  study  and  of  teaching 
has  been  so  peculiar  that  I  hesitate  to  confess 
it.  I  can  never  use  a  former  note  or  an  old 
manuscript.  In  fact  I  have  never  accumulated 
or  possessed  any  of  these;  I  have  always  begun 
every  day  and  every  year  anew,  without  any 
help  from  the  past  through  any  records  of  my 
own.  I  remember  of  any  book  only  what  has 
passed  into  and  become  part  of  myself.  I  have 
made  great  use  of  a  very  few  books,  and  what  of 
these  I  retain  I  can  use  or  teach  only  as  my  own 


6  Introduction 

and  myself.  I  began  quite  early,  for  example, 
to  read  with  an  advanced  class  Aristotle's 
Ethics  —  for  both  the  Greek  and  the  philosophy. 
Unconsciously  Aristotle  became  the  basis  and 
starting  point  of  all  my  thinking.  I  seemed  to 
find  in  him  the  true  root  and  starting  point  of 
all  thought  or  knowledge  of  myself:  Socrates' 
"Know  thyseK"  found  in  him,  in  the  third 
generation,  its  scientific  response,  or  at  least 
the  beginning  of  it.  I  began  to  apply  his 
principles  and  follow  his  lines,  and  found  that 
instruction  built  up  on  that  foundation  was 
not  only  more  satisfactory  to  myself,  but  more 
intelligible  and  self-evident  to  the  classes  than 
upon  any  other  system.  But  while  I  never 
myself  ceased  to  live  in  my  source,  my  teach- 
ing only  started  from  that  beginning  and  more 
and  more  became  my  own. 

My  effort  to  develop  a  theological  depart- 
ment proved  premature,  although  my  associa- 
tion with  those  first  classes,  then  and  since,  has 
been  one  of  the  happiest  experiences  of  my  life, 
and  a  representation  from  those  years  was  an 
indispensable  feature  of  the  reunion.  In  1876 
a  threat  of  failing  health  caused  a  temporary 
break  in  my  courses,  and  theological  instruc- 
tion ceased  until  about   1880,  when,  with  the 


Introduction  7 

completion  of  St.  Luke's  Hall  and  the  organ- 
izing of  a  theological  faculty,  it  was  resumed 
upon  something  of  an  adequate  scale  and  basis. 
From  that  time  began  my  constructive  inter- 
pretation and  teaching  of  the  New  Testament. 
All  the  members  of  my  theological  class  had 
taken,  or  were  required  to  take,  my  ethical 
course  in  the  University,  and  the  unity  and 
continuity  of  the  Ethics  and  the  Exegesis  was 
thoroughly  recognized  and  accepted.  From 
Aristotle  to  Christ  was  a  well-travelled  course; 
the  survey  and  record  of  that  course  I  propose 
to  make  my  next  contribution  to  the  science 
of  thought  and  life. 

As  my  system  and  method  of  Exegesis  grew 
and  took  shape  in  the  thought  and  life  of  the 
class,  questions  naturally  arose,  and  the  new- 
ness of  the  presentation  was  often  an  irritant 
as  well  as  a  stimulant.  I  held  that  my  place 
and  part  was  in  the  mine,  not  in  the  mint,  of 
the  truth  of  Christianity,  that  free  enquiry  and 
investigation,  not  dogma  (which  would  have 
its  proper  place  after),  was  in  order  with  us. 
Everything  was  to  be  tested  and  verified, 
according  to  our  Lord's  prescription,  in  the 
light  and  in  the  terms  of  human  nature,  human 
life,  and  human  destiny.     All  that  was  true 


8  Introduction 

for  us  ought  to  be  true  to  us,  and  would  be  if 
we  were  in  a  state  and  attitude  of  correspond- 
ence with  the  truth.  To  estabHsh  this  corre- 
spondence was  our  task.  Questions  that  arose 
within  the  class  began  to  spread  without  the 
class,  and  the  time  came  when  it  became  neces- 
sary to  make  known  my  teaching  to  a  larger  au- 
dience. I  had  no  call  or  inclination  to  speak  to 
the  Church  or  the  world  save  through  my  pupils, 
and  it  was  they,  not  I,  who  in  loving  compulsion 
forced  the  publication  of  my  first  book,  and 
have  been  behind  as  well  as  in  all  the  rest. 

This  will  explain  in  part  my  relation  to  and 
the  relation  to  me  of  those  who,  in  the  flesh, 
or  only  in  the  spirit,  have  made  and  taken  part 
in  our  reunion.  It  accounts  for  the  fact  that 
the  gathering  is  made  up,  not  of  those  of  one 
way,  but  of  those  of  all  the  ways  of  thinking 
and  believing  in  the  Church.  No  one  thinks 
of  asking  which  way  is  most  or  least  in  evidence 
among  us,  because,  with  whatever  of  differences, 
we  have  learned  here  to  think  and  live  together 
without  sense  or  recognition  of  parties  or 
partisanship.  All  honest  and  reasonable  diffi- 
culties or  convictions  have  been  met  and  treated 
with  equal  interest,  sympathy,  and  mutual 
respect  and  understanding.     There  are  men  now 


Introduction  9 

at  home  and  happy  in  the  Church  who  could 
not  have  entered  or  remained  in  it  outside  of 
such  a  welcoming  atmosphere  of  large-minded- 
ness  and  large-heartedness. 

Of  the  causes  and  the  conditions  which 
rendered  possible  such  an  absolutely  united, 
harmonious,  and  enthusiastic  reunion  and  con- 
ference as  that  at  Sewanee,  I  can  speak  thus 
freely  and  impersonally,  because  while  I  was 
not  unnaturally  honored  with  having  it  called 
by  my  name  —  seeing  that  my  life  and  service 
covered  the  whole  period  and  the  whole  field 
included  in  the  commemoration  —  I  see  in 
myself  only  one  element  and  one  factor  in  that 
sum  total  and  result.  The  life  and  glory  of 
Sewanee  are  in  its  fruits.  Its  Alumni  are  in 
equal  measure  its  products  and  its  real  causes. 
When  I  looked  into  the  face  of  that  body  of 
men,  representing  all  of  the  forty  years  of  my 
service,  I  felt  all  that  I  could  only  imperfectly 
say:  that  if  they  felt  that  in  their  four  years 
with  me  I  had  been  something  to  them,  I  felt 
that  in  my  forty  years  with  them  they  had  been 
everything  to  me:  if,  so  far  as  human  agency 
can  go,  I  had  in  a  little  measure  been  the  mak- 
ing of  them,  they  had  in  far  fuller  measure  been 
the  making  of  me.     And  this  acknowledgment 


10  Introduction 

I  wish  now  and  thus  to  make  to  Sewanee  and 
to  all  my  long  connections,  relations,  and  asso- 
ciations with  it. 

It  was  not  only  the  reunionists  proper  who 
entered  into  and  constituted  that  reunion, 
but  they  were,  of  course,  the  main  agents  and 
actors  in  it.  Their  part  and  contributions,  in 
the  form  of  sermons,  addresses,  and,  not  least, 
informal  and  spontaneous  impressions  and 
testimonies,  were  very  essential  features  and 
values  of  the  occasion  which  it  is  not  given  to 
me  to  record,  except  in  my  heart.  There  are 
acknowledgments  that  can  never  be  expressed; 
they  must  be  felt  and  understood.  The  greater 
part  of  what  is  here  published  was  addressed 
only  to  my  old  students  and  a  very  few  others 
on  equivalent  terms  of  intimacy.  What  was 
said  to  these  was  aptly  denominated,  not  by 
myself,  "Intimate  Talks."  Being  of  this  char- 
aracter,  and  spoken  in  confidence  to  those  who 
neither  could  nor  would  misconstrue  or  mis- 
understand, there  are  doubtless  things  said 
which  are  not  only  more  private  and  personal, 
but  may  be  more  careless  and  unguarded,  than 
would  otherwise  be  the  case. 

There  were  others  than  the  reunionists  who 
contributed  to  the  unique  occasion,  and  first 


Introduction  11 

among  these  I  must  mention  the  community 
of  Sewanee.  One  of  the  first  necessities  of  a 
university  located  as  ours  was,  was  the  crea- 
tion for  itself  and  around  itself  of  a  university 
town.  Projected  with  large  endowments,  and 
the  certain  prospect  of  much  larger,  it  was 
expected  that  the  University  of  the  South 
would  grow  as  Oxford  had  grown  —  town  and 
gown  j)ari  passu  and  together.  Destruction 
and  poverty  has  been  its  actual  lot,  and  the 
University  has  lived  chiefly  upon  its  reason  to 
be,  its  undying  vitality,  and  its  determination 
to  live  through  deserving  to  live.  Its  growth 
has  necessarily  been  slow,  and  the  university 
town  proper  is  still  a  small  community.  But 
there  has  been  compensation:  only  the  fittest 
have  survived — and  the  fitness  has  been 
mainly,  faith,  hope,  love,  and  devotion;  the 
survival  has  been  in  service  and  sacrifice.  The 
lovers  of  Sewanee  have  had  to  show  their  faith 
by  their  works,  and  they  are  naturally  those  who 
are  in  thorough,  intelligent,  and  assured  sym- 
pathy with  the  spirit,  the  ideals,  and  the  aims  of 
the  University.  The  community  has  been  thus 
compacted  together  and  unified  into  one  great 
family,  the  spirit  and  interest  of  which  entered 
fully  into  all  the  proceedings.     What  response 


12  Introduction 

or  acknowledgment  can  be  made,  not  to  such 
demonstrations,  but  to  all  that  lies  behind  them ! 

Not  least  is  the  acknowledgment  I  have 
reserved  for  the  last :  the  letters  from  the  many 
who  would  have  been  natural  participants,  but 
who  could  be  so  only  in  spirit,  not  in  person; 
still  more  the  numerous  communications  from 
this  country  and  from  others,  of  interest  and 
sympathy  on  the  part  of  those  whose  approval 
and  friendship  would  in  itself  be  an  exceeding 
great  comfort  and  reward  for  much  suffered  and 
much  done. 

This  volume  is  made  up  of  the  following 
material:  First,  the  papers  read  by  me  on  the 
successive  days.  These  have  been  somewhat 
added  to  by  including  matter  which  there  was 
not  time  to  deliver,  and  by  enlarging  upon  war 
experiences  by  special  request.  Second,  an 
address  upon  The  Theology  of  the  Child,  read 
the  day  after  the  reunion  by  request  of  a  Sunday 
School  Conference  which  succeeded  it.  Third, 
the  sermon  preached  on  the  Sunday  of  the 
reunion,  which  happened  to  be  the  Feast  of 
the  Transfiguration.  Finally  there  is  reprinted 
a  paper.  Liberty  and  Authority  in  Christian 
Truth,  by  request,  as  being  in  the  general  line 
of  thought  of  the  volume. 


EARLY  SPIRITUAL  LIFE 

T  AM  here  today,  in  my  old  home  and  in 
my  so  long  accustomed  seat,  not  as  a  host 
but  as  a  guest.  I  come  at  the  instance  and  by 
the  invitation  of  those  who  were  my  sometime 
pupils  and  followers  —  some  of  whom  have 
become  in  the  most  real  sense  my  leaders  and 
teachers.  I  have  most  carefully  pondered  all 
the  terms  in  which  the  request  to  me  to  be  here 
has  been  variously  expressed,  with  this  desire: 
that  what  I  may  have  to  supply  or  contribute 
to  the  purpose  of  our  reunion  may  be  as  nearly 
as  possible  conformed  to  the  demand.  I  have 
been  asked,  first,  to  sit  here,  in  this  old  seat, 
for  several  consecutive  days,  and  talk  just  as 
I  used  to  talk  to  you  just  as  you  used  to  be. 
That  is,  perhaps,  in  many  ways  the  most 
impossible  form  in  which  the  request  has  come 
to  me.  But  in  the  one  way  in  which  it  was 
felt  and  meant,  I  am  going  to  try  my  best  to 
comply  with  it. 

13 


14  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

It  has  been  said  again,  or  hoped,  that  I  should, 
at  this  our  last  session  together,  sum  up  and 
put  as  it  were  into  a  nutshell  the  special  truth, 
the  definite  lesson  of  life,  which  I  was  for  thirty- 
six  years  endeavoring,  with  your  help,  to  learn 
and  to  teach.  Yet  again,  it  was  suggested,  not 
at  all  inappropriately  considering  my  three- 
score years  and  fifteen,  that  I  was  to  give  my 
last  counsels  for  the  time,  and  the  times  to  come. 

You  may  imagine  that  a  call  such  as  this  has 
awakened  long,  long  thoughts  in  me,  both  of 
the  past  and  of  the  future.  It  has  made  me 
live  my  life  over  and  ask:  What  has  it  been 
for  me  and  for  others.'^  I  have  nothing  to  give 
you  but  what  I  myself  have  got.  We  can  never 
really  give  to  others  anything  but  what  is  ours 
and  ourselves.  And  now  as  we  meet  in  this 
relation  for  the  last  time,  I  ask  myself:  What 
has  life  given  me  —  what  has  it  given  me  that 
I  have  taken  and  that  I  have  —  that  I  may 
give  you,  if  you  will  take  it?  Reflections  such 
as  these  have  led  me  to  take  as  the  subject  of 
the  three  lectures  this  week:  The  Lesson  of 
my  Life  —  or,  perhaps  better.  Lessons  from  my 
Life.  What  I  mean  is:  the  lesson  or  lessons 
that  life  has  taught  me,  and  that  may  per- 
chance be  of  help  and  use  to  you.     I  am  very 


Early  Spiritual  Life  15 

far  from  thinking  that  my  Hfe  is  the  properest 
life,  or  the  properest  thing,  to  present  to  you; 
but  it  is  the  only  life  and  the  only  thing 
that  is  mine  to  give:  such  as  I  have,  give  I 
unto  you. 

I  have  another  motive  in  the  selection  of 
this  subject.  This  is  a  personal  reunion,  a 
fellowship  of  souls,  and  not  a  comparison  of 
views  or  clash  of  opinions.  As  to  these  latter 
we  are  of  all  sorts,  but  we  come  together  to 
illustrate  the  unity  of  life  that  lies  down  under- 
neath the  infinite  diversities  of  thought  or 
view  or  human  expression.  This  is  a  social 
gathering,  and  let  nothing  be  lacking  to  it  of 
the  light  or  the  graceful  or  the  playful  that 
properly  adorns  the  surface  of  all  pure  human 
social  intercourse.  But  first  of  all  let  us  secure 
that  unity  of  the  spirit  which  will  make  our 
fellowship  together  a  fellowship  too  with  the 
Father  and  with  the  Son.  The  Life  was  mani- 
fested, and  we  have  seen  it  and  know  it,  and 
all  our  fellowship  is  with  it  and  in  it. 

I  have  always  spoken  from  myself,  but  I 
have  never  spoken  of  myself.  It  is  not  easy 
for  me  to  do  so  now,  and  I  do  it  only  in  the 
privacy  of  this  old  class,  always  changing  yet 
always  here  with  me  through  all  the  years  that 


16  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

I  was  here.  I  speak  then  in  the  intimacy  and 
the  confidence  of  those  whom  I  know  and  trust, 
and  who  know  me.  In  the  course  of  nearly 
sixty  years  of  actual  and  conscious  spiritual 
experience  and  observation,  I  have  touched 
and  felt  Christianity  on  pretty  much  all  the 
sides  which  during  that  time  it  has  presented 
to  us.  I  could  not  recall  or  portray  myself 
except  in  all  those  several  aspects  or  phases, 
and  in  such  a  composite,  or  I  should  say  unity, 
of  them  all  as  I  am  now  conscious  of  in  myself. 
In  describing  my  life  then,  I  shall  do  it  in  three 
lectures:  (1)  as  Evangelical,  (2)  as  Churchly, 
and  (3)  as  Catholic  {in  the  widest  sense) ,  these 
being  distinctly  phases,  and  not  stages. 

It  has  been  said  that  life  is  really  lived,  and 
is  itself,  only  in  its  supreme  moments:  only 
the  gods  can  sustain  it  continuously  at  its 
height.  I  don't  know  that  any  of  us  can  claim 
to  have  attained  to  supreme  moments.  At 
any  rate  we  have  had  superior,  or  relatively 
supreme  ones;  and  of  some  such  I  will  speak, 
but  only  of  such  as  were  not  only  what  they 
were  at  the  time,  but  have  been  with  me  since, 
and  are  in  me  still.  I  think  that  you  will 
agree,  when  I  have  described  its  moments, 
that   my   conscious,   voluntary   religious   life, 


Early  Spiritual  Life  17 

beginning  say  at  eighteen,  was  distinctively  of 
the  type  that  we  have  called  evangelical. 

I  was  born  and  bred  in  the  Church,  and 
brought  up  religiously  in  what  St.  Paul  calls 
the  nurture  and  admonition  of  the  Lord.  No 
life,  natural  or  spiritual,  is  of  ourselves,  and 
it  is  impossible  to  tell  just  when  and  how  it 
begins.  Its  causes,  influences,  and  processes 
are  in  operation  before  our  consciousness  of  it 
awakens.  I  cannot  say  when  religion  in  me 
began;  but  I  am  now  concerned  only  with  the 
rise  and  progress  in  myself  of  conscious  and 
voluntary  religion.  Whatever  be  my  own 
theory  of  Christian  nurture,  and  of  the  imper- 
ceptible and  continuous  genesis  and  growth  of 
spiritual  life  under  it,  as  a  matter  of  fact  my 
own,  at  least  conscious,  life  began  with  a 
crisis  —  with  what  had  all  the  appearance  of  a 
sudden  and  instantaneous  conversion.  It  has 
been  with  me  a  life-long  matter  of  scientific  as 
well  as  religious  interest  to  analyze  and  under- 
stand that  experience.  More  and  more,  as  I 
grow  older,  I  live  over  again  through  every 
minutest  detail  of  it  and  apply  anew  to  myself 
what  I  know  to  be  the  eternal  and  essential 
truth  and  meaning  of  it.  In  this  day  of  the 
attempted  scientific  verification  of  spiritual  as 


18  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

well  as  other  phenomena,  I  should  not  hesitate 
among  just  ourselves  to  submit  to  you  all  the 
facts  in  this  case,  as  they  are  still  indelibly 
fixed  in  my  memory  —  if  only  we  had  time. 
As  it  is,  I  will  narrate  only  the  essential  points. 
Three  cadets,  returning  from  a  long  march  and 
series  of  encampments,  and  a  brief  stoppage  at 
their  common  home,  spent  on  their  way  back 
to  their  garrison  a  night  in  a  certain  city,  and 
returned  at  midnight  hilarious  and  weary  from 
what  was  called  a  "roaring  farce"  at  the  little 
theatre,  to  occupy  one  bed  at  the  crowded 
hotel.  In  a  moment  the  others  were  in  bed 
and  asleep.  There  was  no  apparent  reason 
why  I  should  not  have  been  so  too,  or  why  it 
should  just  then  have  occurred  to  me  that  I 
had  not  of  late  been  saying  my  prayers.  Per- 
fectly unconscious  and  unsuspicious  of  any- 
thing unusual,  I  knelt  to  go  through  the  form, 
when  of  a  sudden  there  swept  over  me  a  feeling 
of  the  emptiness  and  unmeaningness  of  the 
act  and  of  my  whole  life  and  self.  I  leapt  to 
my  feet  trembling,  and  then  that  happened 
which  I  can  only  describe  by  saying  that  a 
light  shone  about  me  and  a  Presence  filled  the 
room.  At  the  same  time  an  ineffable  joy  and 
peace  took  possession  of  me  which  it  is  impos- 


Early  Spiritual  Life  19 

sible  either  to  express  or  explain.  I  continued 
I  know  not  how  long,  perfectly  conscious  of, 
simply  but  intensely  feeling,  the  Presence,  and 
fearful,  by  any  movement,  of  breaking  the  spell. 
I  went  to  sleep  at  last  praying  that  it  was  no 
passing  illusion,  but  that  I  should  awake  to 
find  it  an  abiding  reality.  It  proved  so,  and 
now  let  me  say  what  of  verification  my  life  has 
given  to  the  objective  reality  of  that  appearance 
or  manifestation. 

God  has  His  ways  of  coming  to  us,  of  entering 
into  our  world  and  into  our  life  and  making 
them  new:  heaven  is  with  us  when  our  eyes 
are  open  to  see  it.  There  is  only  one  earthly 
and  very  far-off  analogy  which  God  Himself 
uses  and  we  may  therefore  venture  modestly 
to  use.  There  comes  to  a  man  the  love  of  a 
woman,  which  is  different  in  kind  from  any 
other  human  love.  It  comes  for  a  reason  and 
with  a  meaning,  for  the  endless  ends  of  a  rela- 
tion which  is  the  highest  and  holiest  that  can 
exist  between  mortals,  and  that  is  the  earthly 
source  and  spring  of  all  other  human  relations 
and  of  all  human  life.  What  we  call  "falling 
in  love"  comes  to  us  just  as  naturally  and  just 
as  mysteriously  and  inexplicably  as  that  other 
only   more  spiritual  experience   of   which  the 


20  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

Lord  says:  "The  wind  bloweth  where  it  listeth, 
and  thou  hearest  the  sound  thereof,  but  canst 
not  tell  whence  it  cometh  or  whither  it  goeth: 
so  is  every  one  that  is  born  of  the  Spirit." 
The  human  love  comes  simply  because  of  the 
fact  that  the  man  is  made  for  the  woman 
and  the  woman  for  the  man,  and  neither  is 
complete  or  satisfied  without  the  other.  The 
divine  love  in  which  God  makes  Himself  one 
with  us  comes  simply  for  the  reason,  and  be- 
cause of  the  fact,  so  perfectly  expressed  in  the 
ever  new  old  words:  "My  God  Thou  hast  made 
me  for  Thyself,  and  my  soul  will  find  no  rest, 
until  it  rest  in  Thee." 

My  proof,  I  may  say  my  verification,  of  the 
fact  of  God's  coming  to  me,  apart  from  all 
mystery  of  the  way,  may  be  expressed  in  this 
simple  truth  of  experience,  that  in  finding  Him 
I  found  myself:  a  man's  own  self,  when  he 
has  once  truly  come  to  himself,  is  his  best 
and  only  experimental  proof  of  God.  The 
act  of  the  Prodigal's  "coming  to  himself" 
was  also  that  of  his  arising  and  returning  to 
his  Father. 

As  this  was  the  beginning  of  my  awakened 
and  actualized  spiritual  life,  and  must  be  sup- 
posed to  have  contained  in  it  the  potencies  and 


Early  Spiritual  Life  21 

promise  of  all  that  was  to  be,  I  have  sought  to 
recall  just  what,  at  the  time,  there  was  in  it. 
And  the  first  thing  that  strikes  me  was  its  lack 
of  explicitness :  so  little  was  there  in  it  of  the 
definite  and  defined  features  of  Christianity, 
that  it  would  scarcely  seem  to  have  been  as  yet 
distinctively  Christian.  Of  course  I  knew  my 
catechism  and  was  familiar  and  in  sympathy 
with  the  letter  of  Christianity,  but  I  am  tracing 
my  religion  now  solely  as  it  became  the  living 
and  operative  fact  and  factor  of  my  actual 
spiritual  being.  There  was  then  no  conscious 
sense  of  sin,  nor  repentance,  nor  realization  of 
the  meaning  of  the  Cross,  or  of  the  Resurrec- 
tion, or  of  the  Church  or  the  Sacraments,  nor 
indeed  of  the  Incarnation  or  of  Christ  Himself. 
What  then  was  there?  —  There  was  simply  a 
New  World  without  me,  and  a  New  Self  in 
me  —  in  both  which  for  the  first  time,  visibly, 
sensibly,  really,  God  was.  In  just  that,  was 
there  already  implicitly  and  potentially  included 
the  principle  and  truth  of  Regeneration,  Resur- 
rection, and  Eternal  Life,  of  the  putting  and 
passing  away  of  old  things  and  the  coming  to 
pass  of  new,  of  the  as  yet  hidden  meaning  of 
the  Cross,  of  the  heavy  cost  to  both  God  and 
man  of  the  only  possible  or  real  human  redemp- 


22  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

tion?  To  instance  in  a  single  item:  I  for  a 
long  time  thought  it  strange  that  in  my  conver- 
sion, if  that  was  it,  there  was  with  me  so  little 
conscious  thought  or  conviction  of  sin.  But 
then,  also,  I  recalled  that  there  had  been  a  pre- 
vious state  of  self -dissatisfaction,  which  however 
had  been  all  swallowed  up  and  lost  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  being  lifted  out  of  it  into  a  new 
life  of  love  and  hfe  and  holiness.  Had  there  not 
been  implicit  repentance  and  faith,  although  I 
did  not  yet  know  in  them  all  the  death  upon  the 
Cross  of  the  one,  or  all  the  life  from  out  the 
grave  of  the  other .^^  I  recalled  also  that  when, 
after  the  spiritual  crisis,  I  returned  to  my 
natural  habits  and  duties,  the  form  which  the 
intervening  change  in  me  assumed  was  mainly 
that  of  a  sensitized  and  transfigured  —  not 
only  consciousness,  but  —  conscience.  I  had  a 
sense  of  walking  in  the  light,  and  of  at  least 
desiring  and  intending  to  have  no  darkness  in 
me  at  all.  I  can  perfectly  recall  the  ways  and 
even  the  little  instances  in  which  this  disposi- 
tion manifested  itself.  The  task  of  material- 
izing or  actualizing  that  as  yet  only  ideal,  of 
embodying  the  sentiment  of  it  into  habit  and 
character  and  life,  I  was  indeed  far  enough 
from  realizing.     But  were  not  the  principle  and 


Early  Spiritual  Life  23 

the  potency  of  the  whole  already  present  and 
operative  in  me? 

The  moral  so  far  I  would  draw  in  passing  is 
this:  the  spiritual  irrationality  and  impossi- 
bility of  extorting  from  converts  or  beginners, 
or  indeed  of  Christians  all,  any  true  or  real 
confession  of  the  sum  total  or  detailed  contents 
of  Christianity.  The  articles  of  the  Creed  may 
properly  be  required  to  be  repeated  for  entrance 
into  the  Church,  but  only  so  as  they  are  out- 
wardly confessed  and  accepted  as  being  the 
historic,  organic,  and  developed  faith  of  the 
Church,  and  assuredly  not  as  all  digested, 
assimilated,  and  converted  into  the  actual  life 
of  the  incipient  member.  In  other  words,  there 
is  a  great  deal  which  we  may  outwardly  confess 
as  the  faith,  which  we  rightly  hold  on  the  reason- 
able external  authority  of  corporate  and  his- 
torical Christianity,  which  nevertheless  to  be 
compelled  to  profess,  as  in  its  totality  our 
personal  subjective  actual  and  attained  faith, 
would  simply  involve  us  in  either  self-deception 
or  hypocrisy.  On  the  other  hand,  I  shall 
endeavor  by  my  own  example  to  justify  the 
humble  acceptance  of  the  Church's  faith  in 
the  beginning,  and  then  the  life-time  process, 
as  one  can,  of  gradually  digesting,  assimilating. 


24  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

and  converting  that  faith  into  one's  own,  and 
finding  in  it  the  full  food  and  content  of  one's 
life.  But  to  exact  of  every  Christian  at  every 
moment  full  conversion  to  every  item  or  every 
particular  of  even  the  essentials  of  a  complete 
Christianity  is  no  more  a  Christian  procedure 
than  it  was  that  of  Jesus  Christ  Himself. 

I  do  not  wish  to  lose  sight  of  the  fact  that,  in 
even  so  inchoate  a  conversion  and  faith  as  that 
I  am  describing,  there  was,  however  implicit, 
the  reality  of  a  distinctly  Christian  life.  The 
God  into  living  relation  with  Whom  it  brought 
the  soul  was  none  other  than  just  the  God  and 
Father  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ.  God  has 
been  always  in  the  world,  and  there  has  always 
been  in  the  world  a  less  or  more  true  conception 
and  knowledge  of  God,  but  the  only  full  and 
real  God  of  the  soul  is  the  God  of  Christianity. 
The  soul  of  man  is  our  only  ultimate  judge  of 
what  is  true  of  or  in  God,  and  that  for  the  reason 
that  the  human  soul  and  God  are  correspond- 
ent and  correlative  entities  and  energies.  That 
is  God,  in  correspondence  with  Whom  the  soul 
is  its  complete  and  perfect  self;  and  that  is 
the  soul,  in  which  God  most  truly  and  com- 
pletely realizes  and  reproduces  Himself.  At 
the  very  beginning  and  ever  since,  my  one  all- 


Early  Spiritual  Life  25 

sufficient  evidence  of  God  and  of  religion  has 
been  this:  that  in  Him  and  in  it,  and  nowhere 
else,  am  I  my  own  truest  and  best  self;  the 
better  and  more  closely  I  know  Him,  the  truer, 
better,  and  higher  I  am,  and  the  reverse:  when 
I  least  believe  is  always  when  I  am  at  my  low- 
est and  my  worst.  If  we  are  to  judge  truth  by 
the  principle  of  "values,"  then  that  which  puts 
the  most  reason  and  meaning,  the  most  fulness 
and  blessedness,  the  most  worth  and  consistence 
and  permanence  into  human  life,  is  in  itself 
the  truest.  My  conversion  made  me  a  worthier 
and  higher  self,  and  my  life  a  more  valuable 
and  a  happier  life:  and  the  more  that  is  the 
case,  the  more  I  know  it  to  be  true. 

Not  only  is  there  the  distinctively  Christian's 
God  in  such  an  experience,  but  the  most  de- 
veloped Christian  doctrine  of  the  status  and 
relation  between  the  soul  and  God  is  likewise 
implicitly  presupposed  and  involved  in  it:  we 
are  reconciled,  justified,  at-one-d,  and  made 
one  with  God  —  not  by  any  act  or  work  or 
merit  of  our  mere  selves,  but  only  by  placing 
ourselves  within  and  identifying  ourselves  with 
the  love,  the  grace,  the  fellowship  with  us,  of 
God  Himself.  The  little  child,  no  matter  how 
weak,  how  bad,  whatever  it  be,  finds  not  only 


26  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

love  and  peace  and  rest,  but  hope  and  fresh 
strengths  and  new  beginnings  of  life  in  the 
bosom  of  its  mother.  And  to  come  to  God 
"just  as  we  are,"  not  waiting  to  be  good,  and 
find  in  Him,  in  His  eternal  love,  His  infinite 
grace,  His  perfect  fellowship,  all  we  want  for 
holiness,  for  righteousness,  and  for  eternal  life, 
is  only  a  simple  way  of  putting  all  the  vexed 
doctrine  or  dogma  of  justification  by  faith. 

Once  more,  this  may  seem,  so  far,  that  merely 
personal  religion  which  is  in  terms  the  opposite 
of  what  religion  means:  "God  and  the  soul, 
the  soul  and  its  God!"  And  I  must  confess 
that  for  long  that  was  all  that  was  in  it  for  me. 
I  wanted  to  keep  it  all  to  myself,  to  hide  it  as 
much  as  possible  from  all  others.  Yet  at  the 
very  time  I  was  to  all  others,  as  well  as  to 
myself,  better  and  more  than  I  had  ever  been 
before.  In  fact  I  was,  so  far  as  I  can  measure, 
never  after  so  communicative  to  others  of  the 
good  I  was  receiving  and  estimating  for  myself 
as  in  that  time  in  which  I  was  least  presuming 
— nor,  I  fear,  caring — to  help  or  save  others. 
In  every  one  of  three  acknowledgments  from 
fellow-students,  which  I  can  never  forget,  of 
what  I  had  been  to  them  in  their  college  lives, — 
when  I  had  to  plead  guiltless  of  any  intention 


Early  Spiritual  Life  27 

or  even  conscious  will  to  help  them,  the  answer 
was  that  it  was  just  that,  that  if  I  had  ever 
interfered  even  in  thought  to  do  them  good,  I 
should  have  failed  to  do  it.  There  is  this  of 
truth  in  that,  that  we  help  or  hinder  others 
most  in  and  by  what  we  are,  and  not  by  what 
we  say  or  do.  Know  God  and  yourself,  be 
true  to  God  and  yourself,  and  you  will  be  to 
others  all  that  you  are  to  God  and  yourself. 
For  when  you  truly  come  to  look  for  God  and 
yourself,  you  will  never  find  them  in  yourself 
for  long,  but  only  in  others. 

I  am  telHng  the  story  of  my  evangelical,  not 
yet  of  my  high-church  or  my  broad-church  self. 
During  my  university  life  I  did  little  more  than 
hold  fast  that  whereunto  I  had  attained.  I 
was  busy,  under  physical  difficulties  and  dis- 
couragements, with  my  mental  work;  spiritu- 
ally I  was,  as  it  were,  marking  time,  —  that  is, 
keeping  up  the  motions  without  much  forward 
movement.  And  it  is  not  my  desire  to  record 
anything  else  than  actual  steps  forward,  perma- 
nent and  integral  additions  to  my  spiritual  self 
and  life.  When  I  passed  from  university  to 
seminary  and  took  up  directly  the  study  of 
religion  and  of  Christianity,  I  did  so  not  without 
what  I  am  a  little  disposed  to  call  pietism,  — 


28  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

but  will  not,  because  I  think  it  was  not  alto- 
gether unworthy  of  the  better  term  piety.  But 
still  my  religion  was  very  much  in  myself,  and 
there  very  much  in  idea  and  sentiment.  I 
think  that  with  me  naturally  idea  is  more  than 
sentiment,  I  am  rather  disposed  to  be  ideal 
than  sentimental.  But  at  that  time  certain 
things,  most  of  all  music,  moved  me  very  deeply 
and  always  religiously.  Under  the  spell  of  such 
cooperant  emotion  my  mind  was  very  active 
with  its  ideals  and  speculations. 

I  remember  just  at  that  period  a  singularly 
trifling  incident  which  nevertheless  in  its  effect 
has  been  present  with  me  as  an  actual  force 
for  fifty  years.  What  a  very  little  spark  may 
kindle  the  most  destructive  conflagration,  or 
sometimes  the  most  illuminating  and  beneficent 
flame!  In  this  case  so  ridiculous  a  suggestion 
could  not  have  awakened  so  lasting  a  train  of 
thought  and  consequence  if  the  occasion  and 
material  had  not  been  ripe  and  ready  for  it. 
In  an  idle  moment  I  chanced  to  pick  up  an  old 
magazine  in  which  were  narrated  the  military 
experiences  and  exploits  of  a  certain  Lieuten- 
ant Poop.  His  Christian  name  was  Ninkum  — 
Mr.  Ninkum  Poop.  First,  in  most  descriptive 
and    expressive    terms,    were    elaborated    and 


Early  Spiritual  Life  29 

described  the  heroically  high  and  noble  ideals 
and  sentiments  with  which  the  newly  fledged 
lieutenant  devoted  himself  to  the  sacred  service 
of  his  country,  the  great  British  Empire,  — 
what  aspirations,  what  hopes  and  expectations 
and  high-wrought  purposes,  what  dreams  and 
visions  of  self-sacrifice,  and  then  of  honor  and 
greatness  and  glory !  Lieutenant  Ninkum  Poop 
arrives  at  the  seat  of  war,  where  all  his  ideas 
are  to  be  put  into  action  and  all  his  sen- 
timents to  be  converted  into  conduct  and 
character  and  achievement.  He  goes  through 
it  all,  his  thoughts  and  expressions  to  the  end 
swelling  with  the  magnanimity  of  the  great- 
souled,  his  actions  on  the  contrary  evincing 
only  the  pusillanimity  of  the  little-souled,  the 
coward  and  the  poltroon. 

I  would  not  tell  this  simply  as  the  undignified 
illustration  of  a  principle;  I  give  it  as  an  his- 
torical life-moment  and  life-movement  in  my 
spiritual  history.  That  arrow  went  home  and 
still  rankles  in  my  breast.  I  cannot  tell  how 
often  I  have  found  and  called  myself  a  Ninkum 
Poop;  how  often,  in  very  other  terms,  I  have 
preached  the  fact  it  illustrates  to  myself  and 
others :  —  that  life  is  not  life  as  long  as  it  is 
only  in  the  mind,  or  even  in  the  heart;  that  it 


so  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

is  only  life  when  it  has  been  converted  into 
life.  Christianity  has  only  begun  when  it 
begins  to  live  what  it  believes  and  what  it  feels : 
"If  ye  know  these  things,  blessed  are  you  if  ye 
do  them."  Have  we  the  Christianity  that  does 
what  it  says,  that  practises  what  it  preaches? 
What  we  want  is  not  to  have  a  new  Christianity, 
but  to  have  a  new  way  of  having  Christianity : 
a  new  way  which  is  the  old  one,  the  way  of  Him 
who  was,  and  still  is,  the  Way.  He  is  not  alone 
in  Himself  the  truth  and  the  life,  but  no  less 
the  way  to  us  of  really  knowing  the  truth  and 
living  the  life. 

There  was  nothing  to  me  for  some  time  in 
seminary  life  beyond  pleasant  association  and 
useful  routine  work.  The  first  thing  that 
touched  and  really  set  going  the  forward  move- 
ment of  life  and  thought  in  me  came  in  the  form 
of  provocation  from  a  fellow-student.  There 
was  in  our  diocese  at  that  time  a  centre  and 
school  of  Calvinistic  low-churchmanship,  over 
against  another  party  of  moderate  anti-Calvin- 
istic  high-churchmanship.  An  intelligent  and 
aggressive  theological  student  of  the  former 
school  had  gone  to  Princeton  to  find  there  under 
the  Hodges  and  Alexanders  of  that  day  meat 
strong  enough  for  his  spiritual  pabulum,  and 


Early  Spiritual  Life  31 

had  then  been  brought  home  by  the  Bishop  to 
spend  his  senior  year  at  our  seminary,  where 
we  were  entering  as  juniors.  Being  fresh  from 
the  university  and  more  immediately  at  home 
in  Greek  than  the  rest  of  us,  I  was  drawn  by 
our  senior  friend  into  the  question  whether  the 
language  and  argument  of  St.  Paul  did  not 
necessitate  all  the  essential  principles,  the  five 
points,  of  Calvinism.  It  is  impossible  to  over- 
state the  diflSculties  and  perplexities  into  which 
I  was  thus  led  for  several  years  to  come,  and  the 
results  in  all  my  future  thinking  and  teaching. 
It  soon  passed  with  me  beyond  the  mere  issue 
or  question  of  Calvinism,  to  which,  as  you  know, 
I  have  never  reverted;  although,  as  a  living 
question  in  that  day,  it  did  sorely  try  me  until, 
having  absorbed  what  of  truth  and  of  discipline 
I  found  in  it,  I  had  passed  beyond  into  higher 
unities  and  reconciliations.  But  at  the  time  I 
encountered  and  had  to  overcome  this  tempta- 
tion :  We  are  often  enough  tempted  to  believe 
what  antecedent  prejudice  or  inclination  makes 
us  wish  to  believe.  Sometimes  a  strained  hon- 
esty compels  us  to  accept  what  we  do  not 
wish  to  believe,  as  a  heroic  sacrifice  of  inclina- 
tion or  prejudice.  I  asked  myself.  Am  I  pre- 
pared to  make  the  necessary  sacrifice  in  order 


32  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

to  follow  the  truth  wherever  it  may  lead  me? 
And  I  came  near  identifying  that  query  with 
this  one,  Am  I  strong  enough  and  selfless  enough 
to  accept  Calvinism?  Whereas  it  should  have 
been  this,  Am  I  open  and  prepared  to  accept 
Calvinism  if  it  is  indeed,  and  I  fairly  find  it 
to  be,  the  truth? 

But  the  permanent  profit  of  that  experience 
was  that  it  made  me  such  a  life-long  student 
and  companion  of  St.  Paul's  faith  and  life,  as 
has  really  determined  my  whole  subsequent 
character  and  career.  How  that  disposition 
and  bent  was  intensified  and  fixed  in  me  by  the 
long  interruption  and  peculiar  circumstance 
of  the  war,  which  followed  immediately  upon 
this  phase  of  my  spiritual  experience,  I  must 
reserve  for  another  chapter. 


F 


n 

WAR  EXPERIENCES 

lOUR  years  of  my  educational  life  —  from 
sixteen  to  twenty  —  had  been  spent  in 
military  training.  In  the  Military  College  I 
had  held  the  highest  offices  in  my  class,  and  had 
had  some  experience  in  discipline  and  drill. 
Soon  after  the  breaking  out  of  the  war  in  1861 
the  Governor  of  South  Carolina  called  for  the 
organization,  for  State  defence,  the  protection 
of  our  coast  line  and  railroad  connections,  of  a 
command  to  which  he  gave  the  name  of  the 
Holcombe  Legion.  It  was  to  consist  of  a  regi- 
ment of  infantry  and  a  battahon  each  of  cavalry 
and  artillery;  the  superintendent  of  the  State 
Military  College  was  to  organize  and  command 
it,  and  I  was  appointed  his  adjutant.  The 
appointment  found  me  in  the  middle  year  of 
my  seminary  course;  I  accepted  it  and  spent 
the  following  fall  and  winter  in  hard  drill  and 
discipline,  in  skirmishing  with  gunboats,  and 
in  the  occasional  more  romantic  experiences  of 

33 


34  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

camp  life.  We  were  soon  mustered  out  of  State 
into  Confederate  service,  and  the  battles  around 
Richmond  necessitating  a  general  concentra- 
tion in  Virginia,  the  legion  as  such  was  dis- 
membered, and  the  infantry  regiment,  still 
under  the  same  name,  was  incorporated  into 
the  Army  of  Northern  Virginia,  under  General 
Lee.  General  McClellan's  advance  upon  Rich- 
mond having  been  effectually  disposed  of,  we 
began  moving,  about  the  middle  of  August,  to 
meet  the  new  army  advancing  from  Washing- 
ton under  General  Pope.  After  several  pre- 
liminary engagements,  in  one  of  which  I  was 
painfully  hurt,  though  not  disabled,  by  a  frag- 
ment from  a  shrapnel  shell,  the  terrible  battle 
of  Second  Manassas,  or  Second  Bull  Run,  was 
fought  on  August  30.  It  was  a  great  victory, 
but  a  bloody  one,  and  our  own  brigade  was 
wellnigh  destroyed.  My  horse  was  shot,  I 
was  twice  wounded,  and  I  was  the  only  field 
officer  of  the  legion  who  was  left  or  able  to  fight 
through  the  battle.  It  devolved  upon  me  to 
reorganize  the  shattered  regiment  and  to  com- 
mand it  in  the  first  Maryland  invasion,  which 
immediately  ensued. 

Two  weeks  after  the  great  battle  we  made  a 
forced  march  back  from  Hagerstown  to  Boones- 


War  Experiences  35 

boro  Gap,  to  delay  the  passage  across  South 
Mountain  of  the  third  great  Federal  Army  of 
that  year,  1862,  now  again  under  General 
McClellan.  General  Lee  needed  the  time  to 
unite  his  two  army  corps  for  the  approaching 
great  battle  of  Sharpsburg  or  Antietam.  On 
the  fourteenth  of  September  we  barely  suc- 
ceeded in  preventing  the  crossing  that  day. 
Our  own  command  had  had  a  fatiguing  march 
of  sixteen  niiles,  had  climbed  the  mountain  on 
the  north  side,  had  fought  and  been  forced  back 
into  the  gap,  and  at  about  9  p.m.  had  sunk 
dead  with  sleep  in  their  tracks  upon  the  turn- 
pike. Out  of  this  condition  I  was  aroused  by 
the  command  to  take  my  most  available  men 
and  to  connect  with  and  extend  the  picket  line 
on  the  side  of  the  mountain  on  which  we  had 
fought.  This  was  no  easy  task  on  a  dark  night 
in  the  primeval  forest,  and  it  must  have  been 
toward  midnight  before  it  was  accomplished.  I 
had  just  spread  my  oil-cloth  at  the  centre  of  the 
line  and  was  wondering  how  I,  or  any  of  us, 
could  manage  to  keep  awake,  when  another 
order  came:  it  was  thought  that  the  mountain 
above  us  was  abandoned  and  the  enemy  with- 
drawn, and  it  was  necessary  to  ascertain  his 
movements.     I  was  to  ascend  to  the  spot  of 


36  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

the  afternoon's  engagement,  discover,  and 
report.  It  was  a  heavy  and,  unavoidably,  a 
noisy  as  well  as  dangerous  climb;  and  at  the 
steepest  point  near  the  summit  I  left  the  men  in 
position  to  obey  any  summons  and  proceeded 
alone.  Upon  the  plateau  on  top  I  lightly  and 
swiftly  pushed  myreconnoissance  to  the  farthest 
limit,  and  seeing  and  hearing  nothing,  was  in 
the  act  of  returning  satisfied  that  there  was  no 
one  there,  when  it  came  to  me  that,  to  be  per- 
fectly certain,  I  ought  to  make  a  detour  around 
the  plateau.  In  this  way  it  came  about  that  I 
quite  encircled  a  division  of  troops  and  walked 
straight  into  their  lines.  Walking  back,  in 
haK  security  but  very  quietly  and  cautiously, 
with  pistol  in  hand,  I  was  suddenly  brought  up 
with  a  "Halt!"  I  could  not  be  sure  that  it 
was  not  some  of  my  own  men  come  to  meet 
me,  nor  they  that  I  was  not  one  of  theirs,  — 
and  so  it  was  that  we  were  actually  upon  each 
other  before  we  mutually  recognized  each  other 
as  enemies:  I  had  come  upon  a  sentry  of  two 
men  in  the  midst  of  a  bivouac,  and  the  woods 
were  as  sunk  in  sleep  and  stillness  as  if  there 
were  no  life  in  them.  A  man  stood  before  me 
with  the  butt  of  his  gun  upon  the  ground.  As 
he  jerked  up  his  gun  I  stepped  quite  up  to  him 


War  Experiences  37 

and  drew  the  pistol  which  I  had  held  cocked 
under  a  light  cloak.  In  the  act  of  both  doing 
this  and  protecting  myself  from  him,  my  pistol 
was  discharged  prematurely,  and  he,  thinking 
himself  shot,  cried  aloud  and  precipitated  him- 
self upon  me.  In  an  instant  the  mountain  top 
was  awake  and  alive,  and  I  was  upon  the  ground 
in  the  midst,  in  a  desperate  struggle  for  escape. 
The  odds  were  against  me,  and  I  landed  not 
many  days  later  a  prisoner  in  Fort  Delaware. 

Many  years  later  a  reference  to  that  night's 
adventure  and  excitement  appeared  in  the 
history  of  some  Northern  troops.  The  friends 
of  a  faithful  and  deserving  old  soldier  from 
Pennsylvania  made  my  capture  the  ground  for 
an  application  for  pension,  and  I  was  requested 
to  further  his  claim.  After  getting  from  him 
his  side  of  the  story  of  our  momentous  encoun- 
ter, I  gave  him  my  testimony  and  he  got  his 
pension.  From  that  time  on  I  occasionally 
received  letters  from  Cronin  expressing  the 
desire  to  meet  me  again,  and  saying  that  he 
could  not  die  happy  without  doing  so.  To  my 
utter  surprise,  thirty-five  years  at  least  after 
our  first  meeting,  our  second  took  place  at 
Sewanee.  He  suddenly  appeared  there,  ill  and 
travel- worn,  having  made  the  journey  across 


38  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

several  States  to  see  me  again  before  he  died. 
He  said  I  had  come  near  kilHng  him,  and  he 
had  come  nearer  kilHng  me;  for  when  I  had 
twice  almost  got  away,  he  had  at  last,  being  of 
twice  my  strength,  got  me  down,  and  then, 
with  my  own  pistol,  was  in  the  act  of  shooting, 
when  some  mysterious  force  had  held  his  hand 
and  prevented  him.  He  made  me  sit  down  and 
write  for  him  an  account  of  our  two  encounters 
in  war  and  in  peace,  and  then  as  mysteriously 
made  his  disappearance. 

After  two  or  three  months  of  imprisonment 
and  parole  I  rejoined  my  command,  then  doing 
service  in  North  Carolina,  and  just  in  good  time 
to  be  dangerously  and  painfully  wounded  in  an 
engagement  near  the  town  of  Kinston.  This 
was  late  in  December.  Within  those  four 
months  death  had  three  times  touched  me  as 
closely  as  was  consistent  with  escape;  two  of 
my  wounds  missed  most  vital  parts  by  the 
merest  hair's  breadth.  On  my  return  to  Rich- 
mond from  prison  I  was  personally  informed 
that  I  was  dead  and,  on  questioning  it,  was  taken 
to  a  reading-room  and  shown  my  obituary  in 
corroboration. 

In  1863  my  service  was  mainly  along  the 
coasts,    from    Virginia    as    far    as    Vicksburg, 


War  Experiences  39 

Mississippi.      During     that     year    influential 
friends  in  Church  and  State,  probably  to  pre- 
serve what  remained  of  me  for  service  of  another 
kind,  entirely  without  my  knowledge  or  con- 
sent, procured  for  me  a  commission  as  chap- 
lain, with  orders  to  report  at  the  headquarters 
of   Kershaw's   brigade.     In    the   beginning   of 
1864   I  joined  my  new   command   in   winter- 
quarters  about  the  town  of  Greeneville,  Ten- 
nessee.    In  the  little  church  in  that  place,  as 
recently  ordained  deacon,  I  began  my  ministry, 
with    the    most   brilliant   congregations,    from 
major-generals  down  to  privates,  that  I  have 
ever  had  to  address.      Late  in  the  spring  the 
campaign  opened  with  Grant's  advance  upon 
Richmond,  and  after  the  Wilderness  my  duties 
were  mainly  in  the  hospitals,  and  in  private 
ministrations.     In  April,  1865,  the    final    sur- 
render took  place,  and  I  returned  home  to  find 
it  a  picture  of  the  most  utter  desolation,  having 
lain  in  the  centre  of  Sherman's  famous  march. 
This  brief  sketch  of  war  experience  will  give 
some  impression  of  the  four  years'  chasm  in 
the  midst  of  my  preparation  for  my  life's  work. 
It  may  be  supposed  that  there  was  little  oppor- 
tunity in  it  for  study,  or  for  systematic  or  pro- 
gressive thought  upon  religious  matters.     Yet 


40  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

the  war  did  have  its  contribution  to  make,  not 
only  in  its  necessary  effect  upon  my  general 
as  well  as  spiritual  character,  but  more  defi- 
nitely in  determining  and  strengthening  my 
special  bent.  Having  as  adjutant  always  to 
carry  along  with  me  something  of  an  office, 
with  papers  and  books,  and  having  also  with 
me  always  a  very  faithful  and  devoted  servant 
who  took  good  care  of  myself  and  my  belong- 
ings, I  managed  to  carry  a  very  few  books  all 
through  the  war.  In  time  I  secured  an  air- 
tight and  very  strong  little  ammunition  box, 
which  just  held  my  books,  and  which,  becom- 
ing well  knowTi,  was  always  tossed  into  the  head- 
quarters wagon.  In  this  box  were  five  books, 
in  English,  Greek,  Latin,  and  French  —  books 
that,  in  their  contents  as  well  as  language, 
w^ould  not  be  exhausted  or  grow  stale  with 
constant  use.  Of  these,  those  which  are  still 
with  me  are  the  Greek  New  Testament, 
Tennyson's  "Poems,"  Pascal's  "Thoughts," 
and  Xenophon's  "Memorabilia." 

The  only  vein  of  living  thought,  investiga- 
tion, or  speculation  I  had  struck  in  my  too 
short  seminary  course  was  the  question  of  the 
true  mind  and  meaning  of  the  not  merely 
theological  and  doctrinal,  but  intensely  human 


War  Experiences  41 

and  real  St.  Paul.  I  had  begun  already  to 
feel  that  St.  Paul  was  to  be  approached,  known, 
atid  interpreted,  not  on  his  rabbinical  or  doc- 
trinal sides  —  these  were  mere  accidents  of 
tradition  and  training  —  but  on  his  profoundly, 
genuinely,  and  universally  personal  and  spiritual 
side.  I  have  never  been  able  to  see  how  the 
modern  technical  and  dogmatic  conception  of 
the  great  apostle  could  be  reconciled  with  the 
acknowledged  fact  that  St.  Paul  was,  in  his 
own  day  as  well  as  after,  the  great  humanist 
and  universalist,  the  humanizer  and  univer- 
salizer  of  Christianity.  How  little  is  his  Christ 
the  unhuman,  merely  celestial  being,  his  con- 
ception of  the  Cross  the  merely  forensic  act 
or  transaction,  his  justification  by  faith  the 
substitutionary,  unethical,  and  unpsychological 
process  they  have  in  these  modern  times  been 
described!  St.  Paul  is  the  exact  and  inspired 
applier  of  Christianity  to  the  universal  facts 
and  conditions  of  human  life  and  destiny.  Con- 
fessedly it  was  he  alone  who  burst  its  bands, 
released  its  spirit,  and  gave  it  to  the  world.  ^ 
What,  as  against  all  this,  was  either  his  rab- 
binism,  or  his  dogmatism  or  formalism! 

In  the  four  years  of  war,  such  as  I   have 
described  them,  it  may  be  imagined  that  my 


42  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

moments  of  real  thought  and  study  were  rare, 
but  they  were  sometimes  more  intense  and 
precious,  and  probably  more  fruitful,  for  being 
so  difficult  and  so  in  contrast  with  immedi- 
ate avocation  and  environment.  And  it  was 
probably  not  wholly  a  disadvantage  that  my 
thought  and  life,  so  far  as  they  were  my  own, 
should  have  been  so  concentrated  upon  a  single 
line  of  interest  and  exercise.  I  acquired  the 
habit  of  combining  thought  with  life  and  ex- 
perience: it  is  almost  too  much  the  case  with 
me  still  that  I  am  satisfactorily  religious  only 
in  the  act  of  thinking  and  studying,  and  suc- 
cessfully studious  or  thoughtful  only  as  an  act 
of  religion.  For  four  years  my  religious  reading 
was  absolutely  limited  to  my  New  Testament 
and  my  Prayer-Book.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
so  far  as  original,  productive,  or  progressive 
thought  or  study  went,  it  was  at  least  focussed 
upon  the  theology,  philosophy,  psychology  — 
but  most  of  all,  upon  the  practical  religious 
life  —  of  the  Epistles.  I  learned  to  know 
Christ  through  the  minds  and  lives  of  St.  John 
and  St.  Paul,  before  I  ever  really  studied  Him- 
self in  the  Gospels.  The  Epistle  to  the  Romans 
was  really  my  constant  -piece  de  resistance. 
Without  present  or  previous  help  of  dictionary. 


War  Experiences  43 

commentary,  or  any  other  source,  I  set  myself 
over  and  over  to  think  and  Hve  out  the  thought- 
and-life-process  of  that  wonderful  argument. 
I  can  distinctly  remember  lying  on  my  back, 
while  my  men  were  constructing  earthworks, 
and  with  closed  eyes  constructing  for  myself 
the  vital  spiritual  sequence,  unity,  and  com- 
pleteness of  the  first  eight  chapters.  For  a 
long  time  I  simply  overlooked,  or  looked 
through,  the  mere  form  or  technicality  of  St. 
Paul's  teaching,  and  saw  only  the  man  and  the 
meaning  of  his  inner  life  and  thought.  I  after- 
ward learned  to  include  too  his  peculiar  form 
or  technique,  to  value  it  at  its  proper  worth, 
and  to  find  in  it,  if  only  in  the  matter  of  def- 
inition and  illustration,  in  the  thought  and 
language  of  the  time,  a  wonderful  illumination 
and  help.  St.  Paul  was  always  intent  upon 
inward  life-relations  and  processes:  what  he 
taught  was  not  Christianity  but  Christ,  not 
doctrine  but  life,  not  form  but  content  and 
matter.  He  did  have  a  remarkable  technical 
skill  of  form  or  expression,  and  it  was  naturally 
sometimes  rabbinical,  but  he  made  use  of  it 
only  as  instrument  effective  for  the  time,  and 
to  have  erected  his  figures  and  phraseology 
into  an  intellectual  system  and  form  of  letter 


44  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

and  dogma,  has  been  a  wholesale  perversion  of 
his  life  and  spirit.  The  modern  dogmatic  sys- 
tem that  goes  under  the  name  of  Paulinism  is 
our  own  dogmatism  read  into  the  letter  of  his 
language.  I  think  I  may  say  that  whatever  of 
inspiration  or  illumination  ever  came  to  you 
through  my  life  or  teaching,  came  through  the 
fact  that  I  presented  Christ  and  Christianity 
at  first  hand,  not  in  the  letter  but  in  the  spirit, 
not  in  traditional  or  conventional  forms  of 
technical  language,  but  in  living  terms  of  actual 
human  relation  and  experience.  Now  all  that 
I  ever  had  to  impart  in  that  way  came  to 
me  through  a  peculiarly  exclusive  study  and 
knowledge  of  St.  Paul:  I  brought  to  Sewanee 
no  other  theology  than  his. 

But  if  St.  Paul  was  my  only  theology,  for- 
tunately theology  was  not  my  only  interest  or 
thought  in  my  army  life.  I  must  mention 
another  teacher  of  a  very  other  sort  who 
shared  with  him  the  domination  at  that  stage 
of  my  life,  not  only  of  my  interest,  but  of  my 
distinctly  spiritual  and  religious  interest.  What 
I  might  call,  in  its  broadest  sense,  the  romantic 
side  of  life  was  always  more  or  less  present  with 
me.  Up  to  the  time  that  I  was  fully  of  age  and 
very  near  my  university  graduation,  I  knew 


War  Experiences  45 

little  of  literature.  I  knew  a  good  deal  about 
the  authors  that  made  and  the  books  that  con- 
stitute literature,  but  it  was  mostly  from  with- 
out. I  had  read  classics,  ancient  and  modern, 
but  I  had  read  them  for  technical  training,  as 
language  rather  than  as  literature.  It  was 
only  in  my  last  year  at  the  University  of  Vir- 
ginia that  there  was  a  separate  professor  of 
literature;  prior  to  that  the  professor  of  each 
language  taught  something  of  a  history  of  its 
literature,  but  it  was  a  very  secondary  matter. 
Just  before  leaving  the  University  the  spell  of 
Tennyson  first  came  upon  me,  through  "The 
Princess":  the  songs  were  my  poetic  inspira- 
tion and  awakening.  Like  music,  poetry  be- 
came at  once  with  me  associated  with  religion, 
and  gave  a  side  and  aspect  to  it  which  made  it 
beautiful  as  well  as  sacred  and  holy.  This, 
however,  came  so  late  in  life  that,  but  for  the 
opportunity  of  the  war,  I  should  probably 
never  have  had  the  leisure  or  the  abstraction 
necessary  for  the  really  deep  love  of  any  poetry. 
Perhaps  strict  historical  truth  at  once  requires 
and  excuses  the  confession  that  my  own  devo- 
tion to  Tennyson,  which  was  now  to  grow  to  a 
flame,  was  somewhat  intensified  by  the  fact 
that  the  little  blue  and  gold  copy  which  went 


46  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

with  me  into  and  came  with  me  out  of  the  war, 
and  is  now  treasured  up  somewhere,  was  the  gift 
in  camp  of  one  who,  after  the  worst  of  the  perils 
narrated  above,  became  my  wife.  That  Httle 
volume,  toward  the  close,  became  a  treasure 
to  others  at  headquarters  beside  myself,  from 
the  general  down  to  the  courier.  Many  a 
day,  with  a  leg  crossed  over  the  pommel  of  my 
saddle,  as  we  woulid  our  slow  and  romantic  way 
through  the  mountains  of  Virginia,  I  drank  in 
the  music  and  sentiment  of  the  **  Songs," or  pon- 
dered over  the  mysteries  and  questionings  of 
*'In  Memoriam."  Some  of  the  earlier  students 
of  Sewanee  will  remember  that  I  knew  in  those 
days  how  to  enter  as  well  into  the  romance  as 
into  the  severer,  if  not  more  serious,  business 
of  their  life,  and  that  they  got  through  me 
inspiration  and  help  from  Tennyson  as  well  as 
from  more  prescribed  masters. 

To  come  down  to  the  more  directly  spiritual 
part  which  Tennyson  played  in  my  permanent 
history:  an  author,  as  any  one  else,  is  to  us 
very  much  what  we  ourselves  make  him,  or 
how  we  take  him.  To  me  Tennyson  became, 
what  I  may  call,  the  poet  of  the  spiritual,  in 
contrast  with  the  prophet.  The  prophet  speaks 
as  from  God  to  us,  and  therefore  with  certainty 


War  Experiences  47 

and  authority;  he  utters  God's  Word  or  voices 
His  Spirit  to  us  ward.  The  poet  interprets  and 
expresses  us  to  God  ward;  he  voices  not  divine 
revelation  or  inspiration,  but  human  aspiration. 
His  tone  is  often  that  of  perplexed  questioning 
or  even  honest  doubt,  but  —  if  he  is  a  true 
interpreter  of  the  human  spirit,  a  genuine  voice 
crying  in  the  wilderness  of  human  need  — 
always  that  of  open  and  reverent  quest.  The 
muse  of  the  poet  of  the  spirit  is  Melpomene, 
that  of  the  prophet  is  Urania.  Urania  speaks 
seldom  through  Tennyson,  Melpomene  much 
and  with  a  clear,  true  accent  —  as  the  spirit 
in  me  attests.  His  voice,  I  repeat,  is  much 
more  that  of  pure  human  aspiration  than  of 
assured  divine  inspiration,  —  but  we  just  as 
much  need  to  cultivate  and  refine  in  us  the 
human  condition  as  the  divine  power  and  cause 
of  eternal  life.  The  human  soul  would  not 
so  cry  to  God  if  there  were  no  God  to  hear  or 
answer;  and  God  speaks  in  reply,  but  speaks 
only  to  the  soul  that  wants  and  calls  upon 
Him.  The  true  poet  and  the  true  prophet, 
the  poet  who  personates  the  true  aspiration  of 
man,  and  the  prophet  who  mediates  the  true 
reply  of  God,  are  equally  of  essential  service 
to  us.     In  the  rarest  and  highest  instances,  in 


48  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

those  whom  we  pronounce  inspired,  the  two 
offices  are  combined  in  a  single  person.  I  hold 
that  St.  Paul,  at  his  highest,  was  such  a 
one.  If  he  had  not  been  the  poet  he  was,  he 
could  not  have  been  the  prophet  he  was:  the 
thirteenth  and  fifteenth  chapters  of  the  First 
Epistle  to  the  Corinthians  are  poetry  as  well 
as  prophecy,  aspiration  exalted  and  fused  into 
inspiration  and  revelation.  Tennyson's  is,  as 
he  himself  says,  "but  an  earthly  muse";  but 
it  neither  professes  nor  presumes  to  go  farther 
than  it  does,  and  so  far  as  it  goes  it  is  pure 
and  clear.  For  the  time  being  he  was  my  Bible 
of  humanity,  as  my  New  Testament  was  of 
divinity. 

It  is  said  that  life  is  lived  only  in  our  supreme 
moments.  What  of  final  impress  or  character 
I  was  to  receive  from  the  stern  and  unsparing 
discipline  of  war,  was  to  be  focussed  and  fixed 
in  one  such  supreme  experience.  The  brigade 
to  which  I  was  attached  toward  the  close  of 
the  war  was  one  which  had  been  in  every  battle 
of  the  Army  of  Northern  Virginia,  and  whose 
boast  it  was  that  it  had  never  slept  behind 
a  field  of  battle.  A  time  came  at  last  when, 
through  no  fault  of  its  own,  a  glorious  victory 
of  the  morning  was  converted  into  a  disgrace- 


War  Experiences  49 

ful  rout  in  the  afternoon,  and  that  night  the 
brigade  slept  some  ten  or  fifteen  miles  behind 
its  field  of  battle.  When  we  finally  rested  about 
midnight,  I  could  not  sleep ;  the  end  of  the  world 
was  upon  me  as  completely  as  upon  the  Romans 
when  the  barbarians  had  overrun  them.  Never 
once  before  had  dawned  upon  me  the  possi- 
bility of  final  defeat  for  the  Confederate  cause. 
That  night  it  came  over  me  like  a  shock  of 
death  that  the  Confederacy  was  beginning 
to  break:  the  strain  even  of  unbroken  victory 
had  been  too  long  and  too  heavy:  it  would  be 
impossible  much  longer  to  resist  the  force  of 
the  ever-renewed  and  ever-increasing  pressure 
of  new  armies  and  inexhaustible  resources.  To 
represent  the  true  spirit  of  our  ranks  I  must 
add  that  there  was  quick  reaction  from  that 
depression,  and  that  when  the  real  end  did 
come  some  months  later,  I  was  almost  as  much 
surprised  and  shocked  as  I  had  been  in  that 
presentiment  or  prevision  of  it.  But  not  really 
as  much,  —  the  actual  issue  was  all  upon  me 
that  fateful  night  in  which,  under  the  stars, 
alone  upon  the  planet,  without  home  or  country 
or  any  earthly  interest  or  object  before  me,  my 
very  world  at  an  end,  I  rede  voted  myself  wholly 
and  only  to  God,  and  to  the  work  and  life  of 


50  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

His  Kingdom,  whatever  and  wherever  that 
might  be.i 

Of  course  all  was  not  so  lost  as  that  night  it 
seemed  to  me  to  be.  I  came  back  to  earth 
again  and  lived  more  in  it,  and  less  in  that 
otherworldliness  to  which  I  had  thought  so 
wholly  to  give  myself,  than  I  then  expected. 
But  such  an  experience  can  never  be  altogether 
lost,  and  I  go  back  to  it  at  times  for  such  a 
sense  of  the  utter  extinction  of  the  world,  and 
presence  of  only  the  Eternal  and  the  Abiding, 
as  is  seldom  vouchsafed  to  one. 

The  solitary  habit  of  thinking  out  such 
thoughts  and  living  out  such  life  as  came  to  or 
grew  up  in  me  in  the  four  years  of  active  mili- 
tary service,  interspersed  with  trying  adven- 
tures, wounds,  imprisonment,  and  deeper 
experiences  even  than  these,  away  from  all  help 
of  teachers  or  books,  cannot  of  course  but  have 
modified  my  character  and  fixed  my  mental 
habits  and  bent.  I  would  not  have  it  supposed 
that  on  my  return  to  the  wide  world  of  outside 
life  and  thought,  from  which  we  had  been  so 
long  shut  out,  I  did  not  put  myself  at  school  to 

^  The  reverse  of  the  above  picture  of  disaster  and  defeat  may 
be  read  in  the  poetic  version  of  the  same  incident,  from  the 
victorious  side,  known  as  "  Sheridan's  Ride." 


War  Experiences  51 

it,  and  have  not  desired  to  keep  myself  in  touch 
with  the  learning  and  the  movements  of  my 
time.  I  had  learned  to  live  too  much,  no 
doubt,  in  my  own  thinking,  and  have  made 
great  use  of,  perhaps,  too  few  helps.  But  there 
are  compensating  benefits:  one  is,  I  think,  that 
I  can  never  use  a  commentary,  or  seek  a  help 
of  any  kind,  unless  or  until  I  thoroughly  need 
and  want  it  —  that  is,  until  I  have  done  all  that 
I  possibly  can  with  the  matter  myself.  I  even 
try  too  much  to  be  my  own  dictionary  and 
grammar. 

When  at  the  close  of  the  war  I  returned  to  my 
home  and  as  soon  as  possible  entered  upon  my 
permanent  ministry,  conditions  with  us  were 
for  some  years  no  better  than  in  war.  My 
family  had  been  a  wealthy  one  before  the  war, 
but  was  now  utterly  impoverished;  the  country 
was  stript  of  the  barest  means  of  subsistence; 
our  social  and  political  condition  was  unen- 
durable and  hopeless.  There  was  little  means 
or  opportunity  for  a  life  of  study  or  anything 
more  than  the  most  practical  kind  of  thinking. 
Nevertheless  my  appetite  was  none  the  less  for 
long  abstinence,  or  rather  lack  of  nutriment, 
and  I  was  not  loath  to  get  back  to  books  again. 
In  the  six  years  of  parish  work,  before  coming 


52  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

to  Sewanee,  my  life  interest  and  task,  without 
consciousness  or  intention  on  my  part,  was 
being  determined  and  fixed  for  me.  Although 
by  every  prejudice  and  intention  an  Anglican, 
and  unable  to  use  the  German  language,  most 
of  my  reading  and  study  at  this  period  was  of 
German  authors  —  evangelical,  of  course.  And 
it  terminated  in  my  selecting  for  life  study 
Dorner's  great  work  "The  Development  of  the 
Doctrine  of  the  Person  of  Christ."  In  all  my 
consequent,  though  later,  interest  in  Chris- 
tology  I  was  not  aware,  until  after  I  began  to 
publish,  of  any  contemporaneous  or  recent 
scientific  English  thought  upon  the  subject. 

This  brings  me  to  my  connection  with 
Sewanee  and  the  University  of  the  South,  but 
I  must  first  go  back  and  trace  certain  other 
currents  in  my  life,  running  alongside  and 
blending  with  that  I  have  been  describing. 


Ill 

CHURCHLY  INFLUENCES 

TT  will  be  agreed,  I  think,  that  my  life  as  so 
-■-  far  described  was  evangelical  in  its  general 
type  and  character.  It  turned  upon  a  well- 
defined  experience  of  conversion;  it  was  fed 
and  grew  upon  the  Bible;  it  was  essentially  a 
life  of  subjective,  reflective,  personal  religion. 
Whatever  may  be  said  of  evangelicalism,  it  was 
in  possession  of  our  spiritual  world  of  that 
time;  and  with  whatever  may  be  its  limitations 
we  owe  much  if  not  most  of  our  good  to  it. 
But  however  evangelical  I  was,  and  am,  and 
would  ever  more  and  more  be,  I  was  never, 
either  by  prejudice  or  in  principle,  in  sympathy 
with  evangelicalism  —  that  is  to  say,  with  the 
ism,  with  the  name  or  the  thing,  as  badge  or 
confession  of  a  school  or  a  party.  I  love 
its  affirmation  and  emphasis  of  great  truths, 
but  not  its  dissents,  denials,  and  contradic- 
tions of  other  truths,  or  sides  of  truth,  con- 
tradictory  perhaps   of   itself,   but   not   of   its 

53 


54  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

own   truth,    or  of    the  wider,   higher,   greater 
All  of  truth. 

Brought  at  the  beginning  under  the  influ- 
ence of  the  most  beautiful,  refined,  and  attrac- 
tive phase  of  the  newer  Oxford  Movement,  I 
entered  upon  life  with  all  prepossession  in  its 
favor,  with  all  the  poetry,  romance,  and  loyalty 
of  my  nature  enlisted  on  its  side.  Before  any 
knowledge,  or  with  little  realization,  of  what 
the  Church  is,  I  was  with  all  my  heart  and  soul 
a  churchman  and  disposed  in  favor  of  every- 
thing that  is  churchly.  Call  this  prejudice,  if 
you  please,  but  one  is  not  improperly  or  injuri- 
ously prejudiced  in  favor  of  his  home,  his  own, 
his  native  land,  the  truth  or  beauty  or  benefi- 
cence into  which  he  has  been  born.  How  much 
of  what  we  are  have  we  received  as  an  heritage 
and  do  we  rightly  and  necessarily  reverence  and 
value  as  such!  When  I  was  awaked  to  the 
more  actual  assumption  of  my  spiritual  self- 
hood, the  older  evangelical  type  took  posses- 
sion, and  I  cannot  say  that  there  was  much  of 
the  Church  visible  or  sensible  in  the  change 
that  I  was  conscious  of.  Nevertheless,  there 
was  no  discrepancy  or  contradiction,  and  my 
conversion  carried  w4th  it  only  an  access  and 
heightening  of  at  least  the  sentiment  and  in- 


Churchly  Influences  55 

spiration  of  the  new  churchmanship :  I  was 
not  any  the  less  for  it  a  high -churchman.  And 
I  am  now  to  trace  the  help  and  contribution 
to  my  life  of  this  high  and  loyal  sentiment  for 
the  Church.  Let  it  be  remembered  that  if  the 
Church  was  not  to  me  at  that  time  the  broad 
and  all-inclusive  thing  that  it  is,  neither  was 
it  the  narrow  and  exclusive  thing  that  it  might 
have  seemed  to  be.  In  fact  I  knew  little  of 
either  the  inclusiveness  or  the  exclusiveness : 
the  Church  was  to  me  simply  the  divine  insti- 
tution that  claimed  and  attracted  all  the  fealty 
and  devotion  of  my  heart,  mind,  soul,  and  life. 
The  more  divine  it  could  be  made  to  appear, 
the  more  willing  and  satisfied  was  my  loyalty. 
We  all  find  contradictions  in  ourselves  hard 
to  reconcile  and  unify.  My  heart  is  very  dis- 
posed to  faith,  to  recognition  of  truth,  to  trust, 
and  consent,  and  agreement.  But  my  mind 
is  naturally  analytic  and  sceptical.  I  have  all 
my  life  been  coming  to  what  of  truth  I  hold, 
and  there  is  truth  to  which  I  have  all  my  life 
been  coming,  to  which  I  have  not  yet  come. 
All  the  truth  of  the  Church  is  not  yet  mine: 
there  are  points  of  it  that  I  know  to  be  true, 
because  I  have  been  all  the  time  approximating 
to  them;    but  I  am  still  waiting,   and  shall 


56  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

probably  die  waiting,  for  them  to  become  true 
to  me.  Truth  is  not  an  individual  thing;  no 
one  of  us  has  all  of  it  —  even  all  of  it  that  is 
known.  Truth  is  a  corporate  possession,  and 
the  knowledge  of  it  is  a  corporate  process.  It 
enters  slowly  and  painfully  into  the  common 
sense,  the  common  experience,  the  common  use 
and  life  of  men.  There  is  a  corporate,  catholic, 
Christianity,  actually  extant  on  this  earth, 
which  no  one  or  no  set  of  us  holds  all  of,  or 
perfectly  even  what  we  do  hold.  Christianity, 
even  so  far  as  actualized  in  the  world,  is  more 
and  greater  than  any  one  or  any  body  of  us, 
and  the  full  actualization  of  Christianity  will 
come  only  with  the  fruition  of  the  world's 
destiny,  in  the  end  of  the  ages.  When  a  man 
learns  that,  he  will  be  modest  either  about  his 
own  truth  or  about  impugning  other  people's 
truth. 

Without  at  all  defining  its  meaning  or  measur- 
ing its  universality  or  its  authority,  I  realized 
from  the  first  that  there  is  a  Church,  and  that 
there  is  a  faith  of  the  Church,  to  which  my 
loyalty  never  wavered,  even  when  I  was  freely 
and  deliberately  setting  myself,  in  the  light  of 
it,  to  determine  and  establish  my  own  individ- 
ual and  personal  faith.     I  have  long  since  dis- 


Churchly  Influences  57 

covered  that  the  actual  historical  process  by 
which  the  faith  of  the  Church  was  originally 
formulated  is  the  natural  and  logical  process 
by  which  the  eternal,  divine  and  human,  truth 
of  Jesus  Christ  necessarily  defines,  defends,  and 
verifies  itself  in  our  human  experience.  My 
own  mind  like  that  of  the  Church,  and  under 
the  guidance  of  the  Church,  passed  successively 
and  in  the  same  order  through  all  the  heresies. 
I  was  never  historian  enough  to  justify  my 
undertaking,  as  I  did  twenty  odd  years  ago,  to 
tell  the  story  of  the  Great  Councils,  the  period 
of  the  settlement  of  the  Catholic  faith.  I  was 
tempted  to  do  so  by  my  interest  and  my  studies 
in  the  "Development  of  the  Doctrine  of  the 
Person  of  Christ."  The  history  in  my  book 
was  second-hand,  but  the  description  of  the 
process  of  evolution  of  the  doctrine  was  my 
own.  Dorner's  great  work  is  an  analysis  of  all 
living  and  serious  thought  on  the  subject  from 
the  beginning  down  to  his  own  time.  The  mass 
of  it  was  too  great  for  my  digestion,  but  I  felt 
more  and  more  the  unity,  continuity,  and  inevi- 
table outcome  of  all  truth  in  the  theme,  and  was 
under  the  necessity  of  ordering  my  own  thought 
and  bringing  out  my  own  faith,  so  far  as  it  had 
reached.     I  am  convinced  in  my  own  mind, 


58  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

beyond  all  question,  that  the  evolution  of  inter- 
pretation and  expression  of  the  truth  of  Jesus 
Christ  to  the  end  of  the  Sixth  General  Council 
was  in  the  straight  line  to  the  inevitable  end. 
I  am  standing  now  for  absolutely  nothing  in  the 
Councils  but  the  simple  outcome  of  expression 
of  faith  in  the  one  truth  of  the  union  and  unity 
of  the  divine  and  the  human  in  the  one  Per- 
son of  Jesus  Christ.  After  that  Council  thought 
ceased,  and  faith  receded  to  its  stage  even 
before  Chalcedon.  Much  of  what  had  been 
gained  for  the  completeness  of  the  humanity 
of  our  Lord  was  lost,  and  Christianity  became 
too  much  a  one-sided  worship  of  deity  made 
visible  for  adoration  under  the  eikon  or  sem- 
blance of  humanity.  To  me  the  necessary 
deity  of  our  Lord  is  there  to  a  thousand-fold 
more  purpose  and  effect  in  the  actual,  realized, 
and  deified  humanity  in  which  we  recognize 
all  ourselves  and  accomplish  all  our  destiny. 

Truth  is  not  truth  when  it  ceases  to  be  plastic, 
and  faith  is  faith  only  in  the  making.  We 
cannot  simply  receive  it,  for  then  it  is  not  yet 
ours;  and  we  can  never  finish  making  it,  for  it 
ends  only  in  all  truth  and  all  knowledge  of  the 
truth. 

I  can  accept  the  Church's,  or  the  Catholic, 


Churchly  Influences  59 

Creed;  and  could  with  good  conscience  accept 
it,  even  though  it  were  not  yet  all  my  own 
creed,  or  though  I  could  not  see  my  way  to 
ever  making  all  the  incidents  or  details  of  it 
my  own.  Shall  Christ  not  be  mine,  and  I  His, 
because  I  cannot  see  all  the  steps  of  my  way  to 
Him?  —  or  all  the  steps  of  His  way  to  me? 
On  the  other  hand,  to  exact  of  a  man,  at  any 
stage,  an  ex  animo  acceptance  of  every  point  of 
the  Creed,  the  incidental  as  the  essential,  is  to 
demand  that  which  is  for  any  man  an  impossi- 
bility. A  complete  personal  possession  of  faith, 
like  a  perfect  personal  conversion  of  life,  is  an 
impossibility  at  any  time  and  certainly  at  the 
beginning  of  the  spiritual  life.  We  may  con- 
fess the  faith  as  the  Church's  faith  and  pro- 
fess the  life  as  the  Church's  life,  but  to  start 
out  with  saying  that  either  of  them  is  all  per- 
sonally ours  is  either  ignorance  or  hypocrisy. 
On  the  one  hand,  therefore,  I  would  say  that 
for  one  to  suppose  that,  because  the  general 
or  catholic  creed  of  the  Church  is  not  in  every 
point  and  particular,  in  every  interpretation  or 
understanding  of  it,  his  own  personal  and  actual 
creed,  he  has  therefore  at  once  to  teach  or 
preach  against  it,  or  else  so  to  avow  and  pro- 
claim his  dissent  as  to  read  himself  or  be  read 


60  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

out  of  the  Church,  is  illogical  and  unreasonable. 
And  on  the  other  hand,  I  should  say  that  for 
the  Church  to  require  and  demand  that,  ipso 
facto  and  instanter,  her  fully  developed  and 
complete  creed  should  be  ex  animo  and  in  every 
jot  and  tittle  the  personal  and  actual  creed  of 
every  member,  or  of  any  member,  is  equally 
irrational  and  impossible.  There  ought  to  be, 
at  the  least,  as  much  of  divine  patience  and 
tenderness  on  the  part  of  the  Church  toward 
the  incomplete  and  even  the  wilful  believer,  as 
there  ought  to  be  of  modest  deference  and 
obedience  on  the  part  of  the  individual  believer 
to  the  reasonable  and  rightful  authority  of  the 
Church. 

For  my  part  I  have  never  balked  at  the  raw 
beginning  nor  on  the  uncertain  way  of  faith; 
I  have  both  pressed  on  and  waited  until  I  could 
get  something  of  a  general  view  of  the  end  and 
purport  of  it  all.  The  creeds  mean  the  truth, 
the  whole  truth,  and  nothing  but  the  truth  — 
the  truth  of  God  and  of  man,  and  of  the  eternal, 
predestined,  realized  relation  between  them. 
Since  I  have  seen  that,  nothing  else  has  dis- 
turbed or  bothered  me.  Either  what  is  crooked 
in  the  Church's  way  of  putting  it  shall  be  made 
straight  in  time  —  and  I  do  not  say  that  it  is 


Churchly  Influences  61 

not  the  business  of  any  one  of  us  that  can  to 
help  make  it  straight;  only  let  us  go  about  it 
in  the  right  spirit  and  way,  and  in  the  mean- 
time be  modest  and  patient  about  it,  and  take 
and  make  use  of  what  we  have  got  —  or  else, 
if  the  fault  or  defect  is  in  us,  the  right  use  of 
the  part  we  have  got  will  be  the  best  way  to 
the  fuller  revelation  to  us  of  the  whole  of  truth. 
My  own  churchmanship,  as  it  happened,  did 
not  come  to  me  through  Oxford  or  Anglican 
sources.  I  have  mentioned  how  my  mind  got 
turned  into  German  channels;  there  too  I  dis- 
covered and  equally  followed  different  bents 
or  leadings.  There  was,  on  the  one  hand,  the 
pure  and  high  spirituality,  the  personal  sub- 
jectivism of  a  Neander;  and,  on  the  other,  the 
more  objective  and  churchly,  or  corporate,  but 
not  less  spiritual,  tendency  of  an  Olshausen. 
Both  of  these  entered  simultaneously  into  my 
life,  and  I  felt  no  discrepancy  between  them. 
While  the  Oxford  revival  was  in  progress  there 
was  a  corresponding  "churchly"  movement 
going  on  in  Germany.  It  extended  to  this 
country  within  the  German  Reformed,  or  Cal- 
vinistic,  Church,  became  more  emphasized  and 
defined  under  one  or  two  famous  leaders,  and 
gave  place  and  name  to  what  was  called  the 


62  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

Mercersherg  Theology.  This  attracted  me  as 
dealing  with  the  Church  less  as  an  external 
fact  and  authority,  and  more  as  a  necessary 
principle  and  a  true  philosophy. 

The  churchly  principle  begins  with  Chris- 
tianity, not  as  a  human  faith,  but  as  a  divine 
fact,  an  actual  and  present  life  of  God  upon 
earth  and  among  men.  Faith  is  indeed  an 
actual  necessity  for  us,  but  it  is  necessary  only 
as  our  appropriation  and  experience  of  a  prior 
fact;  and  the  fact  must  be  kept  always  prior 
to  the  faith,  the  divine  conveyance  to  the 
human  reception.  If  the  extreme  and  danger 
of  churchliness  is  a  one-sided  objectivism,  that 
of  evangelicalism  is  a  one-sided  subjectivism. 
Man  has  not  created  God  in  his  own  image; 
and  as  little  is  Jesus  Christ  a  human  creation 
or  production,  a  human  ideal  or  imagination  of 
what  God  with  us  and  in  us  would  or  should 
be.  Incarnation  is  just  as  much  a  divine  act 
and  fact  antecedent  to  our  faith  in  it  as  crea- 
tion is  a  divine  act  and  fact  anterior  to  our 
sensible  experience  of  it. 

Incarnation,  again,  is  not  the  mere  revela- 
tion or  manifestation  of  a  Life  in  Jesus  Christ; 
it  is  the  gift  and  communication  of  life  in 
Jesus   Christ.     Its  end  and  operation   is   not 


Churchly  Influences  63 

realized  and  exhausted  in  the  individual  human 
person  of  Jesus  Christ;  it  is  in  operation  and  to 
be  realized  in  that  Mystical  Body  which  is 
Humanity  realized  and  glorified  in  and  through 
Him.  Consequently  the  Church  is  in  a  true 
sense  Jesus  Christ  Himself,  and  relation  to  it 
is  relation  to  Him  and  to  the  divine  Life  which 
He  is.  The  Church  is  the  Life  incorporate  and 
corporate  in  Jesus  Christ.  The  Sacraments  of 
life,  or  of  The  Life,  are  acts  not  of  man  but  of 
God,  the  acts  of  His  incorporation  of  us  into 
Christ.  They  are  not  expressions  of  our  faith 
but  of  the  divine  acts  of  grace  and  adoption  in 
Christ  which  are  the  objects  of  our  faith  and 
in  which  our  faith  stands.  When  Luther  says 
that  Christianity  is  the  simple  realization  of  our 
baptism,  what  he  means  is,  not  that  we  are 
magnifying  a  mere  form  or  rite,  but  that  we 
recognize  in  that  rite  of  divine  appointment  a 
word  and  act  of  God  to  our  souls.  God's  words 
are  never  mere  signs :  they  are  what  they  mean. 
To  realize  our  baptism  is  to  see  in  it,  and 
appropriate  to  ourselves,  and  make  real  in  our 
lives,  the  thing  and  the  whole  thing  signified 
by  it.  The  way  not  to  be  formalists  is  not  to 
reject  form  —  certainly  not  divinely  ordained 
form  —  but  to  see  in  it  only  the  spirit  which 


64  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

it  expresses  and  conveys.  The  Sacraments,  if 
they  are  anything,  are  divine  means  of  grace; 
and  the  grace  meant  by  them  and  wrought 
through  them  is  the  presence  and  spirit  and 
life  of  Christ  born  in  us  and  made  ours  in  bap- 
tism and  fed,  strengthened,  and  refreshed  in  us 
in  that  sacred  and  stated  feast  in  which  we 
have  communion  and  fellowship,  actual  parti- 
cipation of  common  life  with  God  and  with  one 
another  in  Christ,  through  His  Spirit  which  is 
given  us.  Is  it  formalism  to  see  and  receive 
all  this  in  the  Sacrament? — or  is  it  not  rather 
so  to  take  the  Sacrament  because  it  is  divinely 
commanded,  but  to  see  in  it  nothing  but  a 
form.f^ 

There  is  a  catholic  faith  in  Christianity;  but 
prior  to  the  faith,  and  the  ground  and  object 
and  content  of  the  faith,  there  is  a  catholic  life, 
and  that  life  is  the  present,  living,  working  Life 
of  God  of  which  the  Church  is  the  divine 
embodiment,  the  vital  organ  and  organism,  and 
the  Sacraments  the  organic  means  and  channels. 
When  Dean  Stanley  said  that  we  outgrow 
Sacraments,  and  that  they  are  becoming  obso- 
lete, the  one  side  of  me  recognizes  in  that  a 
certain,  perhaps,  truth  for  spirits  such  as  his; 
but  I  am  glad  that  the  other,  the  corporate  or 


Churchly  Influences  65 

churchly  side  of  me,  has  kept  me  loyal  and  faith- 
ful long  enough  to  know  that  in  the  Sacraments 
I  am  living  at  the  very  perennial  springs  and 
fountains  themselves  of  the  Life  which  is 
Christ. 

Upon  the  revival  of  life  and  reality  in  the 
Church  and  the  sacraments  there  followed 
necessarily  a  rehabilitation  of  divine  worship. 
We  must  not  confound  the  true  revival  of  ritual 
with  the  excesses  and  follies  of  a  shallow  ritual- 
ism any  more  than  any  other  truth  or  reality 
with  its  attendant  ism  —  evangehcal  life  with 
the  narrowness  of  evangelicalism,  or  the  regen- 
eration of  the  Church  with  the  extremes  of 
Tractarianism.  The  lawlessnesses  and  abuses 
of  ritualism  are  but  the  foam  and  scum  upon 
the  surface  of  a  very  real  and  true  undercur- 
rent and  movement  of  genuine  Church  life. 
When  I  came  to  Sewanee,  I  came  ignorant  and 
inexperienced  in  all  the  fermentation  that  was 
then  coming  to  its  height  in  these  matters.  My 
one  sympathy  with  the  movement  that  I  felt 
coming  might  be  expressed  in  these  words :  The 
need  of  more  reality  in  life  and  in  religion,  a 
more  actual  and  real  presence  of  God  in  His 
world,  of  Christ  in  His  Church,  of  Spirit  and 
power  in  what  were  too  much  become  to  us 


66  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

mere  obligatory  forms.  I  remember  writing  to 
a  friend  on  my  way  to  Sewanee,  in  reply  to 
some  questioning  about  the  "Real  Presence," 
that  I  wanted  all  the  Real  Presence,  all  the 
"objective"  Real  Presence,  I  could  get  in  every 
act  of  my  religion. 

Again,  we  must  not  confound  the  fact  or 
reality  of  the  Real  Presence,  in  the  Church,  in 
the  sacraments,  or  anywhere  else,  with  the 
logomachies  or  the  superstitions  as  to  the 
modes  or  the  effects  of  the  presence.  What  I 
have  wished,  and  wish,  to  see  at  Sewanee,  as 
a  religious  and  educational  centre,  is  a  high, 
dignified,  and  truly  typical  worship,  fully  expres- 
sive of  the  reality  with  which  we  are  dealing 
and  of  what  we  are  doing;  neither  manifest- 
ing by  our  carelessness  and  indifference  our 
contempt  of  or  superiority  to  forms,  nor,  on 
the  other  hand,  supposing  that  we  have  to  be 
oriental  or  Latin  in  our  exhibitions  of  reverence. 
If  there  were  a  ritual  exactly  and  distinctively 
expressive  of  the  truest  and  most  real  reverence 
of  our  race,  it  would  be  a  simple  and  severe 
one.  We  are  least  demonstrative  when  we 
think  the  most  seriously  and  feel  the  most 
deeply,  and  least  of  all  in  matters  the  most 
sacred.    At  the  same  time,  the  highest  good 


Churchly  Influences  67 

manners   in   the   world   are   those   that  show 
themselves  in  the  presence  of  divine  realities. 

As  there  is  a  catholic  faith  and  a  catholic 
life  and  worship,  in  all  which  there  is  an  under- 
lying and  pervading  unity  which  is  their  essence 
and  content  and  of  which  they  are  but  the 
expression,  so  there  must  be  in  the  Church,  if 
it  is  one  also  in  effective  operation,  a  catholic 
order.  That  the  order  of  the  Church,  as  well 
as  its  faith  and  even  its  life,  is  so  often  and  so 
much  broken  and  divided,  and  so  little  at  one 
with  itself,  proves  nothing  against  this  truth. 
Christianity,  the  Unity  of  humanity  with  and 
in  God,  is  an  ideal  which  is  not  ipso  facto  an 
actuality;  but  it  is  an  ideal  which  it  is  our 
whole  Christian  business  in  this  world,  as  much 
as  we  can  and  as  fast  as  we  can,  to  bring  to 
actuality.  What  is  an  ideal  but  an  end  and 
a  goal,  and  what  is  the  Christian  ideal  of  a 
Unity  which  will  be  in  and  of  itself  all  of  Holi- 
ness and  Righteousness  and  Eternal  Life,  but 
an  end  and  a  goal  which  we  have  the  divinest 
warrant  and  evidence  for  believing  shall  be  our 
inheritance  and  destiny,  just  so  fast  and  so 
soon  as  we,  in  faith  and  obedience,  will  enter 
into  and  possess  it?  The  Church  is  an  organ- 
ism which  must  of  necessity  organize  itself  for 


68  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

the  ends  of  its  proper  function  and  business. 
Its  commission  is  one  and  its  mission  is  one, 
and  it  must  itself  be  one  in  order  to  carry  the 
one  or  discharge  the  other;  the  more  so  too 
since  its  commission  and  mission  is  to  recon- 
cile, at-one,  or  unify,  the  world  with  God,  and 
with  itself  in  God:  "God  was  in  Christ  recon- 
ciling the  world  with  Himself,  and  hath  com- 
mitted unto  us  the  ministry  of  reconciliation." 
If  there  is  to  be  in  the  Church  of  Christ,  as 
one,  any  unity,  not  alone  of  faith  and  life,  but 
of  order  or  organization  or  operation,  of  influ- 
ence and  effect  upon  the  world,  there  must  be 
in  it  some  principle  and  law  of  order.  TVTiat 
that  is,  or  is  to  be,  when  the  Church  is  in  any 
organic  sense  or  degree  one  again,  although  it 
must  always  have  been  a  truth  and  duty  of  the 
past  too,  is  just  now  the  question  of  the  future. 
The  answer  to  it  will  have  to  be  submitted  to 
a  longer  and  larger  tribunal  than  is  now  extant. 
The  several  answers  that  may  be  already  on 
hand,  or  even  any  new  ones  that  are  worthy  of 
consideration,  in  the  great  solution  that  lies 
before  us  ought  to  be  both  urged  and  con- 
sidered only  in  love  and  amity,  not  in  competi- 
tion and  strife.  The  one  end  to  be  sought,  and 
the  one  spirit  in  which  it  can  be  found,  is  unity 


Churchly  Influences  69 

—  whatever,  or  however  great,  may  be  the 
differences  and  the  difficulties.  The  time  has 
come  —  and  something  of  the  disposition  and 
the  will  —  for  the  exercise  and  the  experiment 
of  a  universal  and  supreme  act  of  reason,  love, 
and  self-sacrifice  in  behalf  of  Christ  and  of  His 
work  of  human  salvation. 

Is  it  possible  that  there  can  be  one  body  of 
Christians  that  shall  remain  deaf  to  the  plea, 
indifferent  to  the  ideal  and  the  aspiration,  that, 
in  fact  as  in  theory  and  profession,  all  Christians 
shall  become  one  in  Christ?  There  is  no  con- 
dition which,  if  it  only  remain  actual  long 
enough,  we  cannot  become  accustomed  to  and 
come,  not  only  to  acquiesce  in,  but  to  defend 
and  maintain  as  normal  and  necessary.  There 
is  no  question  that  the  world  around  us  has 
taken  separation  and  alienation,  even  strife 
and  schism,  as  the  natural  and  inevitable  state 
of  things  among  Christians.  There  is  a  some- 
what general  softening  of  spirit  and  relaxing  of 
acrimony  now  in  process,  but  still  even  the 
theory  of  the  one  Church  of  Christ,  and  any- 
thing like  a  practical  unity  among  Christians, 
is  far  from  being  recognized  in  our  popular 
religion  as  a  desideratum,  much  less  as  an 
essential  principle  and  a  practical  necessity  of 


70  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

Christianity.  Nevertheless,  if  they  are  so, 
however  afar  off  we  may  see  the  promise,  we 
must  be  turning  our  face  toward  it  and  moving 
our  steps  in  the  direction  of  it.  It  may  be  as 
yet  a  matter  for  only  the  thinkers  and  the 
leaders,  above  all  for  the  seers,  the  Abrahams 
of  faith  and  hope;  but  these  are  the  movers  of 
the  world,  and  if  they  do  not  move  in  the  matter 
the  world  will  not  be  moved. 

We  have  undertaken,  in  our  measure,  to  be 
standard-bearers  of  mediation,  reconciliation, 
and  unity.  It  is  only  by  example,  as  repre- 
senting the  spirit,  and  ourselves  walking  in  the 
way  of  these,  that  we  can  exercise  any  such 
mission.  The  attitude  which  we  should  take 
for  ourselves,  if  we  would  impress  it  upon  others, 
I  would  state  somewhat  as  follows:  Our  claim 
to  be  a  catholic  Church  must  mean  only  this, 
and  nothing  more,  that  we  desire  and  intend 
and  believe  ourselves  to  be  within  all  the 
essential  and  necessary  principles  of  the  cath- 
olic faith,  life,  and  worship,  and  order  of  the 
one  Church  of  Christ.  We  are  churchmen 
as  members  of  this,  and  not  as  Episcopalians, 
Anglicans,  or  whatever  else,  in  particular,  we 
may  also  be.  As  members  of  The  Church,  in 
this  its  only  sense,  we  are  members  of  all  who 


Churchly  Influences  71 

are  members  of  It  —  that  is  to  say,  not  only, 
visibly,  of  all  baptized  persons,  but  invisibly  of 
all  who  by  the  grace  of  God  are  in  Christ,  by 
which  I  mean  all  who  are  in  the  saving  opera- 
tion of  His  Word  and  Spirit.  We  have,  as 
churchmen,  no  right  to  claim,  as  in  any  sense 
exclusively  our  own  or  exclusively  the  property 
of  any  part  of  the  Church,  that  which  is  catholic 
and  therefore  the  right  of  all  —  whether  or  no 
all  are  in  actual  possession  or  practical  use  of 
it.  On  the  other  hand  we  cannot  ourselves 
forego  the  possession  or  use  of  any  part  of  what 
we  believe  to  be  essential  to,  or  even  a  neces- 
sary means  or  condition  of,  actual  or  ultimate 
unity.  On  this  account,  for  example,  I  may 
not  feel  myself  at  liberty  under  ordinary  cir- 
cumstances to  avail  myself  of  the  Sacraments 
of  other  Christians  and  yet,  still  less,  to 
exclude  them  from,  or  not  welcome  them  to, 
participation  in  my  own.  What  we  need  in 
order  to  know  ourselves  catholic,  or  within 
the  Church  of  Christ,  is  to  be  able  to  answer 
on  the  right  side  such  questions  as  these:  Are 
we,  so  far  as  in  us  Hes,  in  love  and  sympathy 
and  unity  with  Christ  and  Christianity  where- 
ever  these  may  be?  If  not  in  actual  or  outward 
communion  with,  are  we  responsible  for  and 


72  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

guilty  of  alienation  and  separation  from,  any 
part  of  the  living  and  loving  and  working  Body 
of  Jesus  Christ  in  this  world?  How  deeply  and 
sincerely  are  we  wishing  and  praying  and  labor- 
ing to  be  at  one,  and  to  be  one,  with  God  and 
Christ  and  all  their  living  and  saving  presence 
and  operation  in  our  universal  humanity? 

The  time  is  gone  to  be  dwelling  upon  or 
debating  past  responsibilities,  faults,  or  failures. 
All  we  can  do  now  to  any  profit  is  to  repent 
and  regret  them,  and  go  straight  on  to  see  how 
we  can  best  repair  them.  The  present  busi- 
ness of  every  fragment  of  Christianity  is  to 
set  itself  in  preparation  and  readiness  to  be 
at  one  with  every  other.  But  we  shall  never 
prevail  against  any  ism  or  replace  it  with 
anything  better,  until  we  learn  to  meet  and 
overcome  it  with  a  true  and  a  real  catholicity. 

All  human  life,  individual  or  collective,  begins 
under  authority  and  ends  in  freedom.  Human 
government  began  monocratic  and  ends,  or  is 
to  end,  democratic.  There  was  a  time  when 
the  king  ruled,  rightly  because  necessarily,  by 
a  divine  right  —  the  divine  right  of  an  external 
authority  when  there  was  as  yet  nothing  in- 
ternal on  the  part  of  the  ruled  to  direct  and 
control  in  its  stead.     But  because  monarchism. 


Churchly  Influences  73 

even  despotism,  was  at  one  stage  necessary,  it 
does  not  follow  that  individual,  personal,  popu- 
lar responsibility  and  freedom  will  not  be  in 
order  at  another  stage  or  in  the  end.  It  ought 
not  to  be  doubted  that  Roman  spiritual  mon- 
archy and  absolutism  was  a  necessity  and  a 
world-wide  benefit  in  its  time.  But  equally 
ought  it  to  be  remembered  and  realized  that 
the  law  and  authority  and  control  of  all  human 
faith  and  life  cannot  remain  in  one  human 
head  or  self.  However  the  sacred  oil  or  chrism 
was  poured  upon  the  head  of  Aaron,  it  was  not 
to  remain  there  only,  but  was  to  flow  down  to 
his  beard  and  finally  to  the  very  lowest  hem 
of  his  garment.  The  thought,  experience,  veri- 
fication, determination  of  faith,  as  of  all  human 
life,  is  corporate.  It  works  downward  and  out- 
ward, and  there  as  everywhere  else  the  goal, 
and  the  ultimate  criterion,  is  not  in  the  mind 
and  will  of  one,  but  in  the  intelligent  consent 
of  all.  This  is  no  easy  goal  to  reach,  or  even 
to  foresee;  all  we  can  do  is  to  be  looking  and 
moving  slowly  and  wisely  in  the  direction  of 
it.  All  passage  from  monocracy  to  democracy 
is  more  or  less  through  conflict  and  confusion; 
nevertheless  there  is  nothing  to  do  but  to  press 
onward  toward  it. 


IV 

CATHOLIC  PRINCIPLES 

T  7^  THEN  I  speak  of  my  life  as  catholic,  I 
*  ^  use  the  adjective  as  expressive  of  free- 
dom or  liberty  of  thought  and  conviction  in 
religious  matters.  My  aim  is  to  determine 
what  is  the  true  freedom  or  liberty  in  such 
matters.  It  is  not  freedom  from  any  authority 
whatever,  for  if  there  be  any  real  authority, 
freedom  will  consist  in  and  be  measured  by 
the  ability  to  recognize,  regard,  and  obey  it. 
Freedom  is  not  freedom  from  law,  but  freedom 
to  obey  one's  law;  the  law  of  a  thing  is  only 
the  expression  of  the  normal  being  and  activ- 
ity of  the  thing,  its  completion  and  perfection. 
The  law  of  a  person  is  the  mode  of  his  true  self- 
determination  or  liberty.  Whatever  expresses 
that  for  us  possesses  a  real  authority  over  us. 
To  illustrate  in  anticipation,  on  to  the  very 
end:  If  Jesus  Christ  is  indeed  the  revelation 
to  us  both  of  God  and  of  ourselves  —  of  the 
ultimate  unity  of  God  and  ourselves,  and  so  of 

75 


76  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

the  Life  which  is  our  end  and  destiny  —  then 
Jesus  Christ  posesses  a  supreme  and  final 
authority  over  us  as  Lord  of  our  life,  obedience 
to  which  is  upon  penalty,  not  of  any  external 
or  arbitrary  sanction  or  consequence,  but  of 
our  own  sacrifice  of  life  and  liberty  and  true 
selfhood.  So,  too,  the  process  and  progress  of 
our  freedom  is  conditioned  upon  our  determin- 
ing the  true  sources  and  bases  of  authority  and 
conforming  ourselves  to  them. 

We  say,  "All  things  change,  and  we  change 
with  or  in  them."  It  would  be  even  more  true, 
perhaps,  to  say,  "We  change,  and  all  things 
change  in  or  with  us."  Our  world  is  very 
different  from  that  of  one  or  two  or  three 
thousand  years  ago;  but  the  change  has  been 
primarily  and  mainly  in  us  not  in  it.  Men 
change,  not  nature;  or  nature  changes,  chiefly 
if  not  exclusively,  through  men's  discovery, 
control,  and  use  of  it.  Evolution  now  is  that 
of  the  human,  the  personal,  the  spiritual. 
Nature  is  so  wonderfully  other  and  more  than 
it  used  to  be,  because  we  are  so  other  and  more 
in  our  relations  with  it.  In  itself  it  does  not 
really  change;  —  and  in  ourselves  we  do  not 
really  and  truly  change,  except  to  higher  and 
more   of    ourselves.     In    the   right   sense   our 


Catholic  Principles  77 

creeds  —  our  holds  upon  eternity  and  infinity, 
upon  life  and  destiny  —  are  our  most  intimate 
and  permanent  part,  and  are  as  unchangeable  as 
ourselves.  And  yet,  too,  our  creeds  change  with 
us,  change  in  the  respects  in  which  we  necessa- 
rily change  if  we  are  to  go  further  and  be  more. 
Our  creeds  then  do  change  and  are  always 
changing  —  because  we  change  and  are  always 
changing  in  our  conception  and  comprehension 
of  them,  in  our  appreciation,  appropriation, 
and  realization  of  them.  I  hold  that  the 
Creed  ought  to  be  other  chiefly  in  the  sense  of 
being  more  and  truer  to  us  than  it  was  even  to 
those  who  first  framed  it,  and  in  this  way:  In 
humanity  and  in  everything  human,  and  so  no 
less  in  our  hold  upon  God  and  upon  things 
divine,  in  our  Creed,  there  is  a  natural  and  a 
spiritual  element,  there  is  something  which 
changes  with  our  change  and  is  therefore  subject 
to  constant  change;  and  again  there  is  some- 
thing which  belongs  to  and  ministers  to  the 
abiding  and  the  unchangeable,  the  eternal,  in 
us  and  never  changes  except  to  become  more, 
and  more  true,  to  us.  There  is  no  use  for  the 
temporal  in  religion  except  to  be  the  figure  and 
symbol  of  the  eternal,  and  the  longer  and  fuller 
and  firmer  our  grasp  upon  the  eternal,  the  less 


78  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

our  dependence  upon,  the  greater  our  indepen- 
dence of  the  merely  natural  or  temporal.  I  look 
upon  the  creed  from  its  spiritual  and  eternal 
End,  from  which  there  can  be  no  possible 
question  or  doubt  of  it,  because  it  simply  is 
the  truth,  and  the  truth  seen  cannot  be  mis- 
taken. I  have  ceased  to  look  upon  it  in  the 
merely  natural  setting  of  its  temporal  and 
sensible,  because  human,  origin  and  process. 
There  is  a  necessary  mystery  and  veil  over 
anything  like  a  revelation,  an  inspiration,  an 
incarnation,  or  any  other  form  or  degree  of  the 
union  or  uniting  of  the  divine  and  the  human  — 
when  looked  at  from  only  the  human  or  the 
natural  side.  It  can  never  be  explained,  inves- 
tigated, verified,  or  even  perceived  from  that 
side  only :  except  one  be  born  again,  he  cannot 
see  it.  It  requires  other  eyes,  other  observa- 
tion and  experience,  other  tests  and  criteria 
than  those  of  natural  science  or  criticism.  One 
who  genuinely  and  really  applies  and  thoroughly 
applies  to  the  things  of  the  spirit  enumerated 
in  the  Creed  the  only  possible  and  proper 
scepticism  and  criticism,  investigation,  evi- 
dence, and  verification,  will  learn  and  be  con- 
tent to  leave  the  mere  natural  fringes  and 
joinings  of  such  truth  under  the  veil  and  in  the 


Catholic  Principles  79 

mystery  that  belongs  to  them.  If  the  natural 
language  applied  to  the  fact  of  the  Incarnation 
is  an  enigma  to  you,  pass  by  the  word  and 
take  the  thing:  test,  prove,  verify  that,  and 
the  mystery  will  not  trouble  you. 

I  believe  that  I  am  naturally  sensitive  to 
mental  movements  and  changes.  I  think  that 
my  mind  has  become  a  thoroughly  modern 
mind;  I  feel  and  know  that,  for  example,  the 
speech  and  language  of  mediaevalism,  of  the 
pre-scientific  and  pre-historic  age,  is  already 
one  "not  understanded  of  the  people."  We 
still  use  older  words  and  phrases,  we  still  say 
"The  sun  rises"  —  but  they  stand  for  different 
conceptions  of  the  thing,  and  the  thing  is  what 
we  are  after  and  not  the  mere  historic  ways  of 
seeing  or  saying  it.  It  is  useless  to  fight  against 
actual  movements  and  changes;  our  wisdom 
is  to  see  in  them  the  truth,  the  whole  truth,  and 
then,  if  possible,  nothing  but  the  truth,  and 
let  the  rest  pass  by,  as  it  surely  will.  The  best 
way  to  dispose  of  the  error  is  to  establish  the 
truth;  emphasize,  prove,  demonstrate,  and 
manifest  that,  and  time  and  inanition  will  take 
care  of  the  other.  There  w^as  an  incalculable 
wealth  of  truth  and  devotion,  as  of  unqualified 
good,  in  the  scientific  revival  of  the  last  cen- 


80  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

tury;  as  there  was  no  little  of  perversion,  pre- 
tension, and  wide-spread  harm  upon  the  mere 
top.  I  believe  that  I  always  felt  that  scepti- 
cism and  criticism  were  inevitable  instruments 
of  truth  and  righteousness  and  life,  and  that 
nothing  in  this  world  was  proved,  tested,  or 
verified  that  had  not  passed  through  them  to 
the  uttermost  end  and  limit.  What  is  scepti- 
cism in  principle  but  enquiry,  investigation, 
examination.''  and  what  is  criticism  but  sepa- 
rating, distinguishing,  judging,  determining 
between  the  true  and  the  false,  the  good  and 
the  bad?  We  must  not  judge  these  divine 
instruments  by  their  superficial  perversions 
and  abuses,  but  by  their  necessary  and  salutary 
uses.  Our  Lord  says,  "For  hrisis  am  I  come 
into  this  world."  He  Himself  was  spared  no 
question  or  test,  and  He  is  the  supreme  Critic 
and  Judge  of  our  lives:  "The  Word  of  God  is 
quick  and  powerful  and  sharper  than  any  two- 
edged  sword,  and  is  critical  of  all  thoughts  and 
intents  of  the  heart."  "His  fan  is  in  His 
hand  and  He  will  thoroughly  purge  His  floor." 
The  truth  or  right  that  cannot  stand  all  test 
is  not  genuine,  and  that  which  has  not  stood 
all  test  is  not  only  unproven,  but  in  us  it  is 
unpurified  truth  or  righteousness. 


Catholic  Principles  81 

I  was  myself,  as  doubtless  many  others  were, 
subject  to  a  very  specious  and  dangerous  temp- 
tation. There  was  no  little  insinuation  and 
actual  charge  against  Christianity  that  it  was 
not  willing  to  go  with  science  all  the  way  to 
the  end  of  truth,  wherever  it  might  lead.  There 
was  the  assumption  here  that  scientific  investi- 
gation or  historical  criticism  could  lead  all  the 
way  to  the  very  end  of  truth,  and  many, 
through  fear  of  unveracity  and  dishonesty,  of 
unwillingness  to  accept  the  truth  to  the  very 
end,  were  misled  by  it.  The  mere  natural 
cannot  and  is  not  intended  to  compass  that 
which  is  beyond  it,  cannot  pierce  the  mystery 
of  even  such  palpable  earthly  facts  as  human 
freedom  and  personahty,  much  less  that  of  such 
heavenly  things  as  divine  revelations,  inspira- 
tions, and  incarnations.  Yet,  if  there  be  any 
God  at  all,  or  God  to  any  human  purpose, 
there  must  be  such  things  —  whether  they  be 
palpable  to  the  faculties  of  mere  evolutional 
nature  or  not. 

My  own  experience  was  this:  many  a  time 
I  was  impressed  and  attracted  by  the  honesty 
and  thoroughness  of  natural  truth,  unequalled, 
as  I  feared,  in  my  observation  or  experience, 
by    our    spiritual    truth,    which    seemed    ever 


82  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

afraid  to  be  brought  to  full  or  final  proof.  I 
might  at  any  time  have  been  led  away  by  this; 
and  then,  under  the  stimulus  and  satisfaction 
of  the  sacrifice,  drawn  more  and  more  into  the 
noble  pursuit  and  love  of  natural  truth,  and 
more  and  more  out  of  that  of  spiritual  things; 
I  might  have  lived  and  died  in  the  conviction 
that  I  had  done  the  hard,  the  real,  and  the 
true  thing;  and  doubtless  God  would  have 
forgiven  me  the  wrong,  if  indeed  I  was  sincere 
in  believing  I  was  doing  the  right.  I  thank 
God  He  did  not  let  me  take  that  course.  I  re- 
flected that  there  was  another  course  which  I 
was  under  obligation  not  to  despise  and  dismiss 
without  at  least  as  full  and  fair  trial  as  the 
other.  Our  Lord  teaches  us  of  a  truth  of  God, 
a  will  of  God,  a  work  of  God,  which  He  says 
consists  in  believing  in  Him  Whom  God  has 
sent.  And  He  tells  us  that  he  who  will  do  the 
will  shall  know  the  truth  and  work  the  work  of 
God.  The  only  and  whole  test  and  proving  of 
the  truth  is  in  the  doing.  This  is  not  unreason- 
able; it  is  a  question  of  what  life  is,  and  there 
is  no  way  of  verifying  and  knowing  life  but  by 
living  it.  He  who  will  do  the  will  of  God, 
which  our  Lord  says  is  to  believe  in  the  Son  of 
God,  will  have  the  witness  in  himself.     And 


Catholic  Principles  83 

this  is  the  witness,  That  God  hath  given  unto 
us  eternal  life,  and  this  life  is  in  His  Son:  he 
that  hath  the  Son  hath  the  life.  If  we  will 
give  to  the  testing  and  proving,  the  verifying, 
of  that  truth  the  thorough-going  honesty  and 
devotion  that  science  gives  to  natural  knowl- 
edge, there  will  be  no  doubt  of  it  in  us,  and 
there  will  be  no  doubt  of  it  in  the  world.  For 
the  world  does  not  doubt  what  is  actual  and 
real;  its  doubt  of  Christianity  is  disbelief  in 
us  Christians.  My  experience  was  that  if  I 
suffered  myself  to  be  drawn  away  from  spiritual 
things  into  only  natural  things,  I  found  myself 
coming  to  think  that  truth  and  reality  and 
honesty  lay  only  there;  but  that  if,  on  the 
other  hand,  without  at  all  having  to  give  up 
the  natural,  I  was  equally  honest  and  in  earnest 
in  applying  God's  test  to  God's  truth  of  faith 
and  life  in  Jesus  Christ,  I  soon  became  a  thou- 
sand-fold more  certain  that  all  reality  lay  there 
—  even  the  reality,  the  meaning  and  end,  of 
natural  science  itself.  That  which  makes  you 
the  most  in  yourself  in  making  you  most  to  all 
else,  you  cannot  but  accept  as  truth  for  you 
and  the  truth  of  you. 

The  contribution  of  modern  thought  or  the 
modern  mind  to  Christianity  has  been  chiefly 


84  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

the  doing  away  the  chasm  which  had  been 
widening  between  the  natural  and  the  spiritual. 
We  find  God  now  not  only  in  the  non-natural, 
but  wholly  in  the  natural.  This  is  not  to  deny 
the  supernatural,  but  to  see  in  it  the  essential, 
the  higher  and  ultimate  natural.  "There  is  a 
natural,  and  there  is  a  spiritual;  howbeit,  that 
is  not  first  which  is  spiritual,  but  that  which  is 
natural,  and  afterward  that  which  is  spiritual." 
It  is  more  natural  and  rational  that  we  should 
grow  up  spiritually  from  ourselves  into  Christ 
than  that  we  should  have  developed  naturally 
from  the  brute  into  the  man.  The  more  fully 
we  know  Christianity,  the  better  we  know  not 
only  the  spiritual  but  the  natural  also  —  the 
natural  as  explicable  and  justifiable  only  as 
ground  and  setting  of  the  spiritual. 

It  was  through  Bishop  Butler  that  I  came 
first  to  meditate  deeply  upon  the  relation  of 
the  natural  and  the  spiritual  —  and  to  feel  not 
merely  the  analogy  between,  but  the  identity 
within  them.  Later  it  was  Aristotle's  "  Ethics  " 
that  trained  me  to  see,  along  with  the  difference 
and  distance  between,  no  less  the  unity  within 
the  life  and  principles  of  nature  and  those  of 
grace  —  as  only  stages  of  the  same  evolution. 

I  may  illustrate  certain  respects  in  which  the 


Catholic  Principles  85 

modern  mind,  while  it  enables  us  to  hold  truths 
of  religion  even  more  clearly,  compels  us  to  see 
and  understand  them  differently.  Take,  for 
example,  the  truth  of  the  divine  Providence: 
the  old  idea  of  "special  providences"  was  dis- 
tinctly that  even  in  natural  events  God  acted 
outside  and  independently  of  a  course  of  nature, 
or  of  an  invariable  natural  sequence.  We  can 
no  longer,  or  shall  not  much  longer  be  able  to 
hold  the  truth  of  providence  in  that  form. 
And  yet  I  confess  that  I  hold  the  truth  of  a 
universal  and  particular  providence  more  firmly 
and  I  believe  more  really  than  I  ever  did  before. 
I  believe  in  a  personal  providence  in  nature, 
because  I  believe  that  nature  is  God,  is  how 
God  is  and  acts  in  those  things  that  we  call 
natural  because  they  are  the  operation  of  fixed 
and  invariable  laws.  If  those  laws  and  opera- 
tions were  not  fixed  and  invariable,  we  could 
not  live  and  be  rational  and  be  free  in  this 
world.  Therefore  God  in  natural  things  acts 
naturally  and  never  contradicts  or  is  inconsist- 
ent with  Himself.  In  so  far  then  as  His  provi- 
dence is  in  and  through  natural  things,  there  is 
no  deviation  by  any  hair's  breadth  from  the 
course  or  what  we  call  the  causation  of  nature. 
And  yet,  within  the  course  of  nature,  if  any 


86  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

Christian  man  will,  as  St.  Paul  says,  love  God 
and  enter  into  the  meaning  and  operation  of 
His  eternal  and  divine  purpose,  I  know  that 
he  will  find  that  literally  all  things  are  working 
together,  that  God  is  working  all  things  to- 
gether, for  his  individual  and  particular  good: 
"If  God  be  for  us,  what  can  be  against  us?" 
"They  have  not  known  my  ways,"  is  God's 
charge  against  His  people.  God's  ways  are 
not  easy,  He  did  not  spare  His  own  Son,  and 
He  does  not  spare  any  that  are  His  sons;  but 
some  of  us  live  long  enough  to  know  that  His 
ways  are  better  than  our  ways,  and  that  He 
never  fails  to  help  those  whom  He  brings  up 
in  His  steadfast  fear  and  love.  I  cannot  see 
where  God  ever  promises  to  change  natural 
things  or  natural  sequences  for  us.  I  do  see 
where  He  promises  that  in  them  all  and  through 
them  all  we  shall  be  more  than  conquerors. 
To  St.  Paul's  prayer  to  take  away,  the  answer 
was.  My  grace  shall  be  suflScient  for  you.  Our 
Lord  did  not  wait  for  that  answer:  He  pre- 
ferred for  Himself  God's  will  and  way  as 
eternally  and  essentially  best.  "Not  as  I 
will,  but  as  Thou  wilt."  I  may  not  see  how 
God  in  a  uniform  course  of  nature  can  provide 
what  is  best  for  each   soul   in  each  case  any 


Catholic  Principles  87 

more  than  I  can  understand  that  I  myself  am 
free  in  such  a  sequence  of  nature.  But  what 
actually  is,  is  —  whether  it  be  possible  or  no. 
There  are  more  things  than  we  think  that  we 
accept  simply  upon  that  ground. 

The  question  of  Prayer  is  not  separate  from 
that  of  Providence,  in  so  far  as  prayer  is  con- 
nected with  natural  or  temporal  benefits.  The 
principle  of  prayer  is  rooted  in  the  fact  of 
need,  want,  poverty.  Our  Lord  makes  poverty 
the  first  condition  of  spiritual  blessedness,  be- 
cause in  it  begins  all  that  dependence  upon  God 
the  end  of  which  is  oneness  with  Him.  Out  of 
that  poverty  come  all  godly  sorrow,  all  noble 
meekness  and  humility,  all  hunger  and  thirst 
for  rightness  and  fulness  of  life,  all  faith  in 
God,  all  hope  in  self,  all  true  self-reahzation 
and  soul  satisfaction.  Nature  is  meant  to  be 
deficient  and  self  to  be  insufficient :  the  natural 
is  complete  only  in  the  spiritual,  and  every 
self  only  in  God.  Therefore  prayer  is  the 
breath  and  life  of  the  soul:  we  want  God  as 
we  want  the  air  we  breathe  and  the  food  we 
eat.  Prayer  is  properly  for  all  we  want,  from 
the  daily  bread  of  the  body  to  that  which 
nourisheth  to  life  eternal.  We  pray  for  natural 
and  temporal  things  as  well  as  spiritual  and 


88  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

eternal.  But  there  ought  to  be  a  difference: 
when  we  pray  for  natural  goods,  we  ought  to 
pray  for  them  "as  God  wills"  —  that  is  to  say, 
as  they  are  given,  naturally;  and  when  we 
pray  for  spiritual  things,  we  ought  to  pray  for 
them  spiritually. 

What  I  mean  by  praying  for  natural  things 
naturally  is  this:  we  ought  to  recognize  that 
they  come  to  us  in  the  way  and  course  and  order 
of  nature.  But  nature  is  not  a  dead  thing,  a 
senseless  mechanism  or  blind  fortuity:  is  not 
God  in  nature,  and  is  not  nature  God.^  Let  us 
pray  to  God  for  all  we  want  in  the  way  it 
comes,  —  but  let  us  learn  more  and  more  just 
what  we  want,  and  just  how  it  comes:  let  us 
learn  His  ways.  There  are  two  ways  of  God, 
or  two  modes  of  the  one  way:  First,  He  will 
not  change  nature  for  us,  but  He  will,  if  we  love 
Him  and  enter  into  His  purpose,  make  every- 
thing in  nature,  the  good  and  the  evil,  good  to 
us,  work  together  for  our  good.  I  do  not  mean 
that  He  will  do  this  merely  by  fitting  or  adjust- 
ing us  to  things  as  they  are,  but  that  He  will 
make  the  things,  whatever  they  are,  actual 
instruments  and  ministers  of  our  good  —  as  He 
made  Judas  and  Herod  and  Pontius  Pilate,  and 
Satan  and  death  and  hell  all  minister  to  the 


Catholic  Principles  89 

human  glorification,  because  spiritual  perfec- 
tion, of  Jesus  Christ.  Sin  is  the  deepest,  the 
only  essential  evil,  and  He  makes  our  sin  itself 
the  instrument  of  our  good,  as  that  which 
drives  us  out  of  nature  and  self  into  Him  and 
holiness.  And  second,  I  do  not  say  that  God 
will  not  change  nature,  do  away  with  natural 
evils  and  provide  natural  goods,  but  only  that 
He  will  not  do  it  for  us,  in  the  sense  of  instead 
of  us:  He  will  not  do  it  magically  or  miracu- 
lously, or  by  what  we  mean  by  **  special  provi- 
dences." There  is  absolutely  no  limit  to  what 
He  will  do  through  us  and  by  us  in  these  ways 
if  only  we  will  be  workers  with  Him  for  good. 
God  does  not  want  to  put  away  our  sin  by 
magic.  He  wants  us  to  put  it  away  by  hoHness; 
and  so  He  does  not  work  upon  us  by  miracle, 
but  works  in  us  by  grace:  which  means  that 
He  calls  and  moves  and  enables  us  to  put  away 
our  sin  by  repentance  and  to  put  on  holiness 
and  life  by  faith.  And  so  in  natural  as  well  as 
spiritual  matters,  God  does  not  want  merely  a 
clean,  healthy,  wholesome  earth;  He  wants  us 
to  make  the  earth  clean,  healthy,  and  whole- 
some by  living  so  in  it.  He  is  not  going  to  con- 
vert the  wilderness  into  a  garden  for  us;  what 
He  wants  is  not  the  work  but  the  working  and 


90  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

the  workers,  the  love  that  bears  all,  believes 
all,  endures  and  survives  all,  accompHshes  all, 
and  so  at  last  becomes  and  is  all.  And  so 
what  do  we  come  at  last  to  pray  for,  and  how? 
By  at  last  I  mean  when  we  have  passed  beyond 
praying  for  things  as  we  think  we  want  them 
and  come  to  take  them  as  God  knows  we  want 
them.  I  am  a  thorough-going  Trinitarian  in 
prayer:  I  find  God  personally  only  in  the  person 
of  Jesus  Christ,  and  Christ  only  by  His  presence 
to  me  and  with  me  and  in  me  by  the  Holy 
Ghost.  I  pray  to  God  only  for  God,  to  Christ 
only  for  Christ,  to  the  Holy  Ghost  only  for  the 
Holy  Ghost,  and  for  everything  else  natural 
and  spiritual  only  as  through  them  and  by 
them  God  will  give  me  Himself.  Have  we  not 
been  assured  that  "All  things  are  ours".'^  And 
I  see  nowhere  or  how  otherwise  they  are  so  than 
by  the  love  of  the  Father,  through  the  grace  of 
the  Son,  and  in  the  unity  and  fellowship  of  the 
Spirit;  let  the  distinction  or  the  identity  of 
these  be  defined  or  left  undefined  as  they  may, 
they  both  exist  somehow  for  me. 

As  the  modern  mind  in  me  has  corrected 
and  enhghtened,  without  weakening  my  faith 
in  providence  and  prayer,  so  has  it  acted  in 
other  ways.     We  have  our  Christianity  through 


Catholic  Principles  91 

the  Scriptures  and  through  the  Hving  witness 
and  tradition  of  the  Church.  These  are  human 
records  and  evidence;  they  are  part  and  parcel 
of  human  history  and  cannot  escape  the  nat- 
ural tests  of  historical  scepticism  and  criti- 
cism. Nor  can  we  escape,  if  (alas!)  we  would, 
the  actual  and  real  results  of  such  inevitable 
handling  —  our  Lord  in  the  flesh  was  handled 
yet  more  roughly  and  survived  it.  There  is 
no  question  that  the  case  has  been  made  out 
for  the  very  humanness  and  fallibility  of  the 
Scriptures  as  of  the  Church.  Is  their  divine 
origin  and  authority  gone  with  it?  I  confess 
that  the  Scriptures  are  more  divine  to  me  now 
than  they  ever  were  before,  that  I  was  never 
more  a  believer  in  their  inspiration.  If  there 
has  ever  been  anything  in  all  my  life  verified 
by  actual  experience,  it  has  been  the  divinity 
of  the  New  Testament,  after  all  that  criticism 
has  done  with  it.  Just  as  I  have  been  brought 
to  see  and  feel  the  utter  humanity  of  our  Lord 
down  to  its  very  depths,  and  have  been  only 
thus  the  more  convinced  of  His  deity:  it  is  the 
utterness  of  His  humanity  that  is  the  proof  of 
His  divinity.  "The  work  that  Thou  gavest 
me  to  accomplish,  that  work  which  I  have 
accomplished,  beareth  witness  of  me." 


92  Turning  Points  in  My  Life 

So  with  the  Church  and  its  witness:  surely, 
if  anything  has  ever  manifested  itself  in  fact 
and  in  history,  it  is  the  humanness  and  the 
fallibility  of  the  Church.  Men  may  well  ex- 
claim, where  is  the  Church?  —  and  what  is 
Christianity?  Yet  I  take  my  stand  upon  the 
fact  of  the  Church  and  upon  the  truth  of 
Christianity.  I  believe  that  our  Lord  will  be 
with  us  to  the  end  of  the  world,  and  that  the 
gates  of  hell  shall  not  prevail  against  Him. 
There  is  a  Spirit  of  truth,  of  whom  our  Lord 
says,  "The  world  cannot  receive  Him,  for  it 
seeth  Him  not  neither  knoweth  Him :  ye  know 
Him;  for  He  abideth  with  you  and  shall  be  in 
you.  Yet  a  little  while,  and  the  world  seeth  me 
no  more;  but  ye  see  me:  because  I  live,  ye 
shall  live  also.  In  that  day  ye  shall  know  that 
I  am  in  my  Father,  and  ye  in  Me,  and  I  in 
you."  Is  there  no  real  experience  expressed  in 
these  words,  nor  any  real  evidence  given  or  veri- 
fication reached  through  it?  The  wisdom  of  a 
merely  natural  scepticism  or  investigation  is 
to  recognize  its  natural  limitation,  to  be 
satisfied  with  its  own  proper  agnosticism  as 
pertaining  to  the  facts  of  the  spirit.  The 
"comparing,  or  combining,  spiritual  things  with 
spiritual,"  of  which  St.  Paul  speaks,  is  best 


Catholic  Principles  93 

accomplished  by  meeting  spiritual  truths  with 
spiritual  minds,  proving  and  verifying  them  by 
spiritual  tests  and  experiences.  "The  natural 
man  receiveth  not  the  things  of  the  Spirit  of 
God:  he  cannot  know  them,  because  they  are 
spiritually  examined  and  judged." 

I  have  striven  to  keep  a  free  and  an  open 
mind,  and  it  seems  to  me  that  the  freest  mind 
is  that  which  is  open  alike  to  the  claims  of  the 
natural  and  of  the  spiritual  in  us,  not  to  either 
as  against  the  other.  I  should  rather  try  to 
hold  both,  though  in  unsuccessful  combination 
and  adjustment,  than  to  be,  through  a  narrow 
and  one-sided  devotion,  ever  so  expert  in  the 
one  at  the  sacrifice  of  possible  untried  and 
unknown  worth  and  value  in  the  other.  But 
again,  I  am  not  only  as  I  was  before  the  nine- 
teenth century  opened  and  liberated  my  mind. 
I  see  all  that  is  divine  and  permanent  in  Chris- 
tianity, in  my  Christian  Creed,  in  a  clearer  light, 
in  better  perspective  and  truer  proportions,  than 
I  ever  did  before.  What  if  on  the  natural  edges 
and  joinings  of  it,  as  I  have  said,  all  is  not  per- 
fectly even  yet  clear  and  smooth— I  have  learned 
to  hold  my  mind  in  suspense  upon  matters  which 
we  have  eternity  in  which  to  know,  and  to 
know  which  eternity  will  not  be  too  long. 


THE  THEOLOGY  OF  THE  CHILD 

rpHE  theology  of  the  child,  I  shall  try  to 
show,  is  all  contained  in  the  reason,  the 
meaning,  and  the  truth  of  Baptism.  I  believe 
that  if  we  could  start  at  the  divinely  instituted 
beginning  of  the  spiritual  life  and  see  in  bap- 
tism not  only  all  the  reason  for  it  and  the 
meaning  in  it,  but,  above  all,  all  the  reality 
of  it  as  an  immediate  and  direct  utterance  of 
the  Word,  and  presence  and  operation  of  the 
Spirit,  of  God,  —  if  we  could  take  in  and  live 
out  the  pregnant  saying  of  Luther  to  the  effect 
that  the  sum  and  substance  of  Christianity 
is  to  realize  or  actualize  one's  baptism  —  the 
conclusion  of  the  whole  matter  would  be  in 
our  hands.  It  is  a  great  deal,  but  it  is  not 
enough  to  say  that  "Baptism  doth  represent 
unto  us  our  profession"  as  Christians.  It  does 
truly  and  perfectly  represent  it,  but  the  func- 
tion of  baptism — as  St.  Paul,  for  example,  sees 
it  —  is  not  simply  to  represent,  it  is  to  effect, 

95 


96  The  Theology  of  the  Child 

to  constitute,  to  he  —  as  it  is  the  function  of 
our  faith  to  take  it  as  what  God's  grace  makes 
it.  Along  with  baptism  we  proceed  too  often 
to  make  all  of  Christianity  a  mere  sign,  repre- 
sentation, or  expression,  of  something  unreal 
and  non-existent.  I  say  non-existent,  because 
baptism  means  something  of  and  in  us,  and  if 
we  deny  that,  then  we  make  it  a  mere  form  of 
something  that  is  not. 

Christians  were  to  be  constituted  such  by 
baptism  into  Christ;  what  they  were  thus, 
by  divine  grace  —  that  is  by  the  right,  title, 
and  power  of  God,  —  potentially  constituted 
and  made,  they  were  to  be,  actu,  by  what 
Luther  called  realizing  it.  What  th^  means 
may  be  illustrated  in  a  popular  and  homely 
way  by  an  expression  recently  in  vogue  among 
us,  as  when  we  say  that  the  only  way  to  do 
certain  things  is  to  do  them  —  or,  we  may  add, 
the  only  way  to  be  certain  things  is  to  be 
them.  In  other  words,  there  are  certain 
matters  which  wait  and  depend  simply  and 
solely  upon  our  being  and  doing.  The  man 
whom  God  regenerates  in  baptism  is  then  not 
actu  regenerate,  only  because  he  will  not  be. 
Suppose  he  takes  God  at  His  word,  and  him- 
self in  faith  and  sincerity  says  that  he  is  and 


Turning  Points  in  My  Life  97 

knows  himself  to  be  what  God  says  He  is,  is 
he  not  regenerate?  What  is  it  more  to  be 
regenerate  than  to  know  yourself  where  God 
places  you,  and  what  God  makes  you,  in  bap- 
tism? If  you  are  regenerate  by  God's  grace, 
and  not  so  in  your  faith,  where  is  the  fault  and 
the  failure  but  in  your  own  not  being. 

All  this  will  become  clear  only  by  reflection 
upon  what  baptism  is  in  Christianity.  St. 
Paul  says:  "Thanks  be  to  God,  that,  whereas 
ye  were  servants  of  sin,  ye  became  obedi- 
ent from  the  heart  to  that  form  of  teaching 
whereunto  ye  were  delivered."  Interpreting 
the  apostle's  mind  from  his  entire  argument 
(Rom.  vi),  which  is  based  upon  the  truth  of 
baptism,  we  may  explain  some  of  the  above 
words  as  follows:  "Ye  were  conformed  to  the 
mould  into  which  ye  were  cast"  —  that  is, 
in  baptism.  Baptism  is,  first,  "into  Christ." 
Christ  is  that  perfected  relation  of  God  to  man 
and  of  man  to  God,  that  accomplished  unity 
of  both  in  one,  which  has  been  effected  and 
exists  in  His  person.  Into  this  reconciliation 
or  at-one-ment  God  brings  us  by  His  act  of 
grace  in  baptism  and  bids  us  realize  or  actualize 
it  in  ourselves  by  faith.  The  function  of  faith 
is  simply  to  take  God  at  His  word,  to  make 


98  The  Theology  of  the  Child 

good  in  ourselves,  by  our  own  being  and  doing, 
what  He  calls  and  makes  us.  "Whatsoever 
now  ye  do,  do  all  in  the  name  of  the  Lord 
Jesus."  He  is  your  relation  to  God,  your 
status  with  God.  You  have  only  to  be  and 
to  do  in  that  name,  and  He  will  supply  not 
only  all  the  authority,  all  the  right  and  title, 
but  all  the  grace  and  power  to  realize  the 
relation  into  which  you  are  placed.  Baptism 
is  not  an  act  of  man  which  his  faith  goes  before 
and  accomplishes,  it  is  an  act  of  God  which  his 
faith  comes  after  and  accepts  and  appropriates 
and  realizes  or  actualizes  in  himself.  We  do 
not  tell  our  children  that,  if  they  will  repent 
and  believe,  they  will  be  or  become  children  of 
God.  That  is  just  what  they  cannot  do,  or 
make  themselves.  We  tell  them  that  they  are 
children  of  God,  that  God's  grace  has  gone 
before  and  made  them  so,  that  not  only  all 
the  right  and  title  but  all  the  grace  and  power 
of  it  are  theirs  in  Christ,  and  that  their  part  is 
only  to  be  and  do  what  God  in  Christ  will  be 
and  do  in  them.  It  is  only  their  faith  and 
will  to  be  and  do  that,  that  is  needed  to  enable 
them  to  say  out  of  a  full  experience  of  the 
heart,  with  St.  Paul:  "I  can  bear  all  things,  I 
can  do  all  things,  I  can  be  all  things,  through 


Turning  Points  in  My  Life  99 

Him  that  loved  me."  In  His  name,  His  grace 
is  sufficient  for  all  my  needs.  "Because  we  are 
sons,  God  sends  forth  the  Spirit  of  His  Son  into 
our  hearts,  crying  Abba,  Father."  We  are  not 
sons  because  we  have  the  spirit  of  sons,  we 
have  the  spirit  of  sons  because  we  are  sons. 
And  nothing  will  give  us  or  bring  us  the  spirit 
and  disposition  and  reaHty  of  sonship  but  the 
realizing  that  we  are  sons.  Baptism  is  not 
magic,  it  is  the  simplest,  plainest,  most  direct 
address  and  appeal  to  our  intelligence,  our 
affections,  our  will,  our  whole  selves  that  is 
possible.  It  simply  tells  us  immediately  from 
God  Himself  that  He  is  one  with  us  and  we 
are  one  with  Him  in  Christ:  that  through  simple 
faith  in  and  realization  of  that  fact  we  become 
the  objects  and  subjects  of  His  eternal  love, 
infinite  grace,  and  perfect  fellowship  of  life. 
Just  let  us  take  that  in,  and  it  will  work 
itself:  a  real  or  realizing  faith  is  patently  the 
sole  condition  of  a  real  and  self-realizing  divine 
grace. 

It  is  not  necessary  that  children  should 
realize  or  know  all  at  once  the  entire  rationale 
and  operation  of  grace  working  through  faith. 
Let  them  at  first,  as  St.  John  says,  simply 
"know  the  Father";   and  they  can  know  Him 


100  The  Theology  of  the  Child 

really  only  as  "the  God  and  Father  of  our 
Lord  and  Saviour  Jesus  Christ."  The  simplest 
knowledge  of  God  will  beget,  and  nourish  with 
its  own  growth,  the  instinct  of  holiness,  right- 
eousness, and  eternal  life.  The  sense  and  full 
experience  of  sin  will  come  of  itself  in  due 
course  and  with  it  the  need  and  experience  of 
the  redeeming  power  and  operation  of  grace. 
Let  us  know,  as  we  need  it,  that  we  have  all 
these  in  Christ  —  and  we  have  them.  "Be- 
hold," says  St.  John,  "what  manner  of  love 
the  Father  hath  bestowed  upon  us,  that  we 
should  be  called  children  of  God  —  and  we 
are."  But  it  is  not  enough  that  we  should  be 
called,  —  we  must  call  ourselves,  realize  and 
know  ourselves  to  be,  if  we  would  really  and 
actually  he. 

But  we  do  not  know  Jesus  Christ,  or  what  it 
is  to  be  baptized  into  Him,  until  we  know  Him 
crucified,  dead,  and  risen.  It  may  not  be  neces- 
sary for  us  to  understand  or  define  the  process 
by  which  the  Word  of  God  at-one-d  Himself 
with  humanity  in  the  person  of  our  Lord,  but 
it  is  necessary  for  us  to  follow  the  way  in  which 
the  humanity  in  Him  at-one-d  itself  with  God; 
for  the  way  by  which  He  brought  us  to  God  is 
the  only  way  by  which  in  Him  we  come  to 


Turning  Points  in  My  Life         101 

God.  According  to  St.  Paul  all  humanity  as 
one  man  sinned  and  was  fallen:  this  simply 
expresses  the  indubitable  universal  fact  that 
**in  Adam"  (that  is,  in  themselves)  all  sin  and 
all  die.  That  is  the  actual  condition  of  hu- 
manity, and  our  Lord  in  taking  upon  Himself 
our  humanity  took  upon  Him  its  condition,  its 
sin;  in  assuming  our  nature  assumed  its  curse. 
**He  was  made  sin  for  us.  Who  knew  no  sin,  that 
we  might  be  made,  or  become,  the  righteous- 
ness of  God  in  Him."  And  how  did  He  bring 
our  fallen  nature,  our  sinful  humanity,  out  of 
sin  and  death  into  the  holiness  and  righteous- 
ness and  life  of  God.^  Why,  simply  by  dying 
in  all  that  mere  nature,  that  insuflScient  and 
impotent  selfhood,  in  which  humanity  cannot 
but  be  sinful  and  dead,  and  living  in  that 
oneness  with  God  which  is  in  itself  holiness 
and  life. 

I  have  said  that  for  childhood  simply  to  be 
in  Christ,  to  know  the  Father,  and  to  know 
ourselves  His  children,  the  objects  of  His  love. 
His  grace.  His  closest  and  most  continuous 
fellowship  and  companionship,  is  enough  to 
quicken  and  nourish  the  instinct  and  princi- 
ple of  holiness,  righteousness,  and  life.  But 
humanity  is  very  much  more  than  childhood: 


102  The  Theology  of  the  Child 

life  is  a  dream  to  which  we  have  to  awaken,  an 
ideal  which  we  have  to  make  actual,  a  work 
which  we  have  to  accomplish,  an  end  which 
we  have  to  attain.  And  in  all  that  there  is 
just  as  much  not  to  do,,  or  even  to  undo,  as 
there  is  to  do.  There  is  no  such  thing  as 
spirit  or  personality  which  does  not  begin  in 
one  form  of  freedom  and  end  in  another.  There 
is  no  such  thing  as  freedom  without  the  exer- 
cise of  choice,  or  choice  without  the  possibility 
of  opposites  and  the  necessity  of  a  decision 
between  them.  We  cannot  get  rid  of  the  alter- 
native of  good  or  bad,  right  or  wTong,  glory  or 
shame,  life  or  death.  The  only  life  of  one  of 
these  is  in  the  death  of  the  other,  the  only 
death  of  one  is  in  the  life  of  the  other.  The 
issue  for  us  is  between  the  flesh  and  the  spirit: 
we  can  live  in  either  only  by  dying  in  the  other. 
The  flesh  means  living  in  mere  seK  as  organ- 
ized into  the  constitution  and  conditions  of 
nature.  The  Spirit  means  living  in  eternal, 
infinite,  and  perfect  relations  of  oneness  with 
God.  The  Spirit  is  in  enmity  with  the  flesh, 
or  with  the  self  in  us,  only  as  these  are  in 
alienation  from  Itself  and  so  subject  to  sin 
and  death;  It  is  in  reality  the  fulfilment  of 
both   the   flesh    and   the   self    as   instruments 


Turning  Points  in  My  Life         103 

through  It  of  holiness  and  hfe.  The  formal 
freedom  with  which  we  begin  is  the  personal 
choice  between  the  flesh  and  the  spirit;  the 
real  freedom  with  which  we  truly  end  is  the 
subjection  of  flesh  and  self,  not  by  extinction 
but  by  fulfilment,  by  conversion  from  all  false 
independence  into  instruments  of  the  sole 
control  and  dominion  of  Spirit. 

This  whole  experience  of  what  the  Christ 
meant  in  Himself,  and  what  He  means  equally 
in  us,  as  not  only  God  with  us  and  in  us,  but 
God  with  us  and  in  us  in  the  necessary  and 
indispensable  process  of  our  redemption,  in  the 
act  and  accomplishment  of  our  death  to  sin, 
which  is  the  death  of  death  itself  in  us,  and  our 
resurrection  to  holiness,  which  is  the  life  of  God 
Himself  in  us,  —  all  this  experience,  I  say, 
follows  in  organic  and  actual  sequence  upon 
every  real  and  effectual  attempt  to  live  the 
life  of  the  spirit,  which  is  the  life  of  God.  We 
must  die  to  each  previous  mode  or  relation  of 
life  in  order  to  live  in  the  higher  which  succeeds 
and  must  displace  it:  We  know  Christ,  either 
in  Himself  or  in  ourselves,  only  as  we  know  Him 
crucified.  Every  child  can  know  at  least  the 
beginnings  of  repentance  and  faith,  himself  as 
he  is  in  himself  and  as  he  is  in  Christ,  and  to 


104  The  Theology  of  the  Child 

know  so  much  is  to  enter  upon  an  experience 
which  ends  properly  and  wholly  in  the  death 
to  sin  and  the  life  of  holiness  and  God. 

Not  only  all  theology  of  the  child,  but  all 
theology  takes  its  rise,  if  not  in  baptism,  yet  in 
that  relation  of  God  to  us  and  of  us  to  God 
which  is  embodied  in  baptism  as  not  only  its 
expression  but  its  instrument  and  mean.  The 
question  as  to  whether  baptism  was  "into 
Christ,"  or  into  **the  name  of  the  Father 
and  of  the  Son  and  of  the  Holy  Ghost,"  is, 
from  the  theological  point  of  view,  no  ques- 
tion at  all.  There  is  nothing  in  the  latter  and 
fuller  formula  that  is  not,  more  than  merely 
implicitly,  contained  in  the  former.  Already 
"Christ"  means  "Us  in  God,"  and  that  rela- 
tion of  God  to  us  and  us  to  God  can  find 
no  other  expression,  because  it  has  no  other 
existence,  than  "in  the  name  of  Father,  and 
Son,  and  Holy  Ghost"  — or,  "in  the  love  of 
the  Father,  through  the  grace  of  the  Son, 
by  impartation  and  participation  of  the  Holy 
Ghost."  The  Trinity  is  primarily  not  a  dogma 
but  a  pragma.  It  is  not  a  definition  but  an 
actuality  and  a  manifestation  of  God  as  One 
in  Three.  I  know  God  only  as  Christ:  that 
is  the  only  objective  manifestation  of  Him,  as 


Turning  Points  in  My  Life         105 

Himself,  to  us.  I  may  know  of  Him,  invisible 
things  of  Him,  in  other  things,  as  Creation; 
but  I  know  Himself  only  in  Christ.  And  I 
know  Christ  only  in  and  through  the  Holy 
Ghost  in  me.  I  may  know  of  Him  —  objec- 
tively through  the  testimony  and  historically 
through  the  records  of  others;  but  I  know 
Himself  only  in  His  presence  in  me  by  the 
Spirit  in  me,  Who  is  both  He  and  God.  More- 
over, what  Christ  manifests,  as  the  essence  of 
Himself  and  the  substance  of  what  He  has  to 
impart,  is  Sonship:  baptism  into  Him  is  bap- 
tism into  all  the  fulness  of  His  accomplished 
human  relation  to  God.  It  not  only  reveals 
but  makes  God  Father,  and  us  Sons.  As,  again, 
the  essence  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  and  the  substance 
of  what  He  has  to  impart  in  us,  is  the  Spirit, 
which  is  Life,  which  is  Christ,  which  is  God. 

It  was  impossible  for  the  primitive  Church 
to  think  and  speak  of  God  but  in  terms  of 
God's  Self -manifestation  and  living  incarnation 
and  operation,  that  is  to  say,  except  in  terms 
of  Christ  and  the  Holy  Ghost;  but  what  I 
wish  to  repeat  and  emphasize  is  that  the  whole 
impulse  and  motive  and  manner  of  thinking 
and  speaking  of  God  in  Trinity  was  pragmatic 
and  not  dogmatic.     They  knew  God  in  Trinity, 


106  The  Theology  of  the  Child 

because  God  came  to  them  in  Trinity,  mani- 
fested and  gave  Himself  to  them  through 
Trinity.  If  there  had  been  no  Son  of  God 
Incarnate,  no  Christ,  there  would  have  been 
no  God,  in  that  culminating  and  completing 
act  and  relation  in  which  alone  we  know  God, 
through  His  actual  entrance  as  personal  and 
controlling  agent  and  factor  in  our  lives.  If 
there  had  been  no  Holy  Ghost,  there  would  have 
been  no  Christ;  for  Christ  comes  by  revelation 
not  only  without  but  within  us;  He  came 
originally,  for  what  He  was,  neither  to  nor  in 
any  save  those  to  whom  the  Holy  Ghost  im- 
parted the  necessary  illumination,  in  whom  He 
wrought  and  communicated  the  incarnation 
that  Christ  was. 

If  we  would,  as  we  should,  hold  nature  in 
toto,  and  God  in  toto,  we  must  make  up  our 
minds  to  find  relations  and  connections  between 
God  and  us  in  matters  of  fact,  and  not  in 
modes  of  statement  or  explanation.  God,  by 
His  Word,  through  His  Spirit,  or  God  in  His 
Son,  and  by  His  Spirit  —  is  a  fact  of  relation 
and  community  between  Him  and  us,  which 
exists  and  persists  in  itself,  no  matter  what  the 
inadequacies  or  contradictions  of  the  terms  — 
Person,  and  Persons,  and  Trinity  —  which  we 


Turning  Points  in  My  Life         107 

use  in  expressing  it.  If  the  Church,  in  its 
spiritual  philosophizing,  has  pushed  back  these 
distinctions  and  integrations,  behind  the  In- 
carnation, into  all  the  cosmic  or  creational 
activities,  and  even  into  the  very  nature  and 
interrelations  of  God  Himself  —  that  is  a 
matter  of  philosophy  which  need  not  disturb 
the  mind  of  children;  if  they  are  taught  it,  it 
is  as  the  mind  of  the  Church,  not  their  own  — 
at  least  until  they  have  grown  into  very  much 
more  than  children. 

It  is  in  keeping  with  the  above  that,  his- 
torically, the  Creed,  or  Creeds,  did  grow  up 
out  of  the  baptismal  formula;  and  that,  while 
it  did  confine  itself  to  facts  of  divine-human 
relation  —  the  Unity  and  Community  of  God 
and  man,  a  relation  in  itself  possible  and  actual 
for  the  simplest  and  the  youngest  —  yet  its 
statement  of  that  relation,  as  nearly  as  human 
language  permitted,  was  in  exact  terms  of  the 
highest  spiritual  philosophy.  I  do  not  see  how 
children  can  be  taught  aught  else  than  the 
Church's  Creed;  but  the  practical  and  impor- 
tant thing  is  how  it  ought  to  be  taught.  There 
are  some  things  about  which  we  ought  to  be 
careful  and  some  that  we  ought  to  avoid. 

In  the  first  place,  neither  the  minds  nor  the 


108  The  Theology  of  the  Child 

experiences  of  children,  their  spiritual  knowl- 
edge nor  their  spiritual  growth,  ought  to  be 
prematurely  pressed  or  matured.  With  any 
child  or  person  thoughtful  enough,  and  sincere 
enough,  really  to  raise  the  question,  the  dis- 
tinction ought  to  be  made  between  his  faith  in 
what  he  professes  and  that  profession  as  the 
Church's  faith.  Not  too  much  of  modesty 
and  good  sense  can  be  inculcated  in  him  as  to 
the  difference  between  his  qualification  and  the 
Church's  to  judge  and  say  what  is  the  truth 
and  faith  of  Christianity;  but  the  child  should 
be  taught,  as  every  one  of  us  needs  to  have 
learned,  how  to  use  all  the  spiritual  knowledge 
and  life,  all  the  actual  faith  and  grace,  he  has 
got;  and  not  to  judge  as  yet  what  he  has  not 
got,  but  modestly  to  expect  that  what  has 
received  common  consent  he  too  in  time  will 
consent  to.  Such  an  attitude  will  reap  the 
reward  of  discovering  in  due  process  that  old 
and  tried  and  accepted  truth  is  larger  and  wiser 
than  young  doubt  or  dissent.  But,  at  any  rate, 
the  time  is  past  when  even  the  child  is  to  be 
trained  to  have  no  mind  in  the  faith  he  believes, 
or  will  of  his  own  in  the  life  he  lives,  that  the 
Christian  layman  is  and  is  to  be  a  perpetual 
minor  under  the  direction  of  a  priesthood  and 


Turning  Points  in  My  Life         109 

the  priest  himself  only  a  moulded  mind  and 
will  under  the  authority  of  a  higher  and  un- 
questionable system.  There  is  no  human  being 
that  is  not  under  individual  and  personal 
responsibility  to  have  a  right  reason  and  a  free 
will.  The  catholicity  of  the  future  will  have 
to  rest,  no  matter  how  difficult  or  impossible  it 
may  seem,  upon  a  common  sense  recognition 
of  the  rational  and  rightful  authority  of  the 
Unity  of  Consent. 

A  premature  and  unreal  faith  is  no  more  to  be 
avoided  than  a  premature  and  unreal  experi- 
ence and  profession  of  life.  There  is  enough 
in  the  simple  being  in  Christ  and  growing  up 
in  him  that  is  knowable  and  usable  even  from 
infancy,  without  forcing  a  child's  experience, 
or  any  immature  experience,  into  stages  and 
reaches  that  are  beyond  it.  We  may,  as  I  have 
said,  be  in  Christ  for  holiness,  for  righteousness, 
and  for  actual  life  in  God  long  before,  by 
sufficient  experience  and  knowledge  of  sin,  we 
really  feel  the  need  or  appreciate  the  truth  and 
the  blessedness  of  the  death  in  Him  to  sin,  and 
the  life,  through  that  death,  to  God.  It  is 
very  true  that  nothing  can  be  said  too  much  of 
either  the  sinfulness  or  the  wretchedness  of  sin, 
nor  yet  of  the  glory  and  the  bliss  of  a  redemp- 


110  The  Theology  of  the  Child 

tion  from  it,  which  is  nothing  less  than  a  re- 
generation and  a  resurrection,  but  much  of  all 
this  is  true  and  intelligible  only  to  those  who 
have  long  and  honestly  and  truly  essayed  the 
life  of  God,  and  have  discovered  for  them- 
selves the  deficiencies  of  nature  and  the  insuf- 
ficiencies of  themselves,  how  hard  it  is  for  man 
to  be  perfect  as  God  Himself  is  perfect.  And 
there  is  no  other  way  of  perfection,  nor  end 
and  goal  of  perfection.  "By  the  law  is  the 
knowledge  of  sin";  and  it  is  only  as  we  have 
known  the  law,  and  measured  for  ourselves  our 
degree  of  conformity  to  it  and  the  extent  of  our 
transgression  of  it,  that  we  can  know  all  the 
meaning  either  of  sin  itself  or  of  our  redemption 
from  it.  Only  the  saint  knows  sin;  only  he 
who  thus  knows  sin  knows  the  Cross;  only  he 
who  knows  the  Cross  knows  redemption  and 
resurrection  and  eternal  life.  The  Church 
teaches  us  all  this  and  gives  us  all  this,  but  it 
can  neither  give  it  all  nor  teach  it  all  in  a 
minute,  because  these  are  things  to  be  learned 
and  had  only  in  and  through  the  actual  experi- 
ences of  a  full  life.  If  we  insist  upon  requiring 
the  fruits  and  accumulations  of  a  full  faith  as 
a  prerequisite  and  condition  of  faith  at  all,  or 
life  at  all,  the  consequence  will  only  be  what  we 


Turning  Points  in  My  Life         111 

already  see.  This  is  an  age  in  which  everything 
must  stand  or  fall  by  its  own  internal  virtue 
of  reality.  Professions  and  pretensions  must 
go  down  before  the  true  and  wholesome  spirit 
of  scepticism,  criticism,  and  verification  which 
will  spare  nothing  as  too  sacred  for  it,  and  which 
is  most  needed  just  in  the  things  that  are  the 
most  sacred.  The  only  thing  on  God's  earth 
that  is  going  to  escape  or  survive  the  winnowing 
fan,  the  refiner's  fire,  that  Christianity  above 
all  things  ought  to  be  and  is,  is  the  thing, 
whatever  it  is,  that  is  genuine,  that  is  real. 


VI 

SERMON 

Preached  in  the  University  Chapel, 

Sewanee,    on    the    Feast    of    the 

Transfiguration,  1911 

"7  determined  not  to  know  anything  among 
you  save  Jesus  Christ,  and  Him  crucified,''^  — 
1  Cor.  ii.  2. 

/^N  this  one  occasion  of  my  life,  in  this 
place,  and  upon  this  spot,  I  may  pre- 
sume to  be  somewhat  personal.  When  the 
suggestion  was  made  to  me  of  this  week, 
naturally  the  meaning  and  the  possibly  use- 
ful purpose  of  it  came  very  powerfully  over  me, 
and  long  and  very  serious  thought  arose  —  of 
myself,  of  Sewanee  and  my  forty  years  here,  of 
the  Church  that  placed  us  here,  of  the  time, 
and  the  times,  past  and  future.  What  have 
we  done?  What  are  we?  What  are  we  going 
to  do  and  to  be?  In  fact,  the  very  first  hint, 
some  years  ago,  of  such  an  occasion  as  this 
came  to  me  coupled  with  some  such  question- 

113 


114  Sermon  at  Sewanee 

ing :  What  can  we  put,  not  only  into  shape,  but 
into  motion  here  at  Sewanee,  for  Sewanee,  for 
the  Church,  for  our  country  and  our  time? 
No  doubt  such  questions  have  come  to  many 
of  us  in  the  form:  What  new  thing  can  we 
devise,  what  new  interest  arouse,  what  new 
movement  inaugurate?  I  suggest  in  anticipa- 
tion what  is  probably  a  better  form  of  the 
query :  How  can  we  acquire  the  secret  of  making 
the  old  ever  new,  and  keeping  it  so? 

Some  illustrations  have  recently  come  to  us 
right  here  of  how  something  like  that  might 
be  accomplished.  It  is  not  so  long  since  doubts 
and  fears  and  forebodings  were  rife  in  many  of 
our  minds.  Under  the  look  of  things  as  they 
were,  it  was  impossible  to  come  here  or  be  here 
and  not  ask:  Are  we  in  the  right  place?  How 
much  longer  can  we  live  under  these  con- 
ditions? We  came  here  this  summer  —  and 
looked  around  —  and  rubbed  our  eyes  —  and 
asked  ourselves:  Where  are  we?  What  has 
happened?  The  old  place,  the  very,  dear,  old 
spot,  had  been  transfigured,  had  become  new. 
With  it  the  whole  tone  of  things  was  altered: 
What  a  beautiful  place  was  Sewanee!  What  a 
perfect,  predestined  spot  for  such  a  mind  and 
heart  and  life  centre!     But  that  was  not  half 


Sermon  at  Sewanee  115 

the  transformation.  We  had  heard  that  stu- 
dents, trustees,  alumni,  residents  were  all 
disheartened  and  despondent  —  and,  lo !  the 
transfiguration  on  our  mountain  top  of  the 
mere  ground  was  as  nothing  to  that  which  had 
come  over  the  spirit  of  Sewanee;  never  was 
determination  so  determined,  and,  by  sheer 
consequence,  never  were  hopes  more  high  or 
was  life  more  active. 

What  is  the  moral  already?  We  do  not  for- 
ever want  new  things;  we  want  the  art  of  keep- 
ing things  forever  new.  The  change  we  need 
is  not  in  the  things,  it  is  in  us  and  our  hold  upon 
the  things  —  our  life  in  them,  our  use  of  them, 
our  labor  for  them.  Let  us  remember  that  our 
Lord  taught  absolutely  nothing  new  —  the 
Gospel  was  older  than  the  Law,  God's  love 
than  man's  obedience.  He  Himself,  the  in- 
carnation of  our  faith,  our  hope,  our  life,  was 
before  Moses,  before  Abraham,  before  Adam, 
before  the  foundation  of  the  earth,  as  old  as 
God,  because  He  was  God's  love-disposition, 
love-purpose.  Self-realization  in  us  and  in  His 
world.  Our  Lord  spoke  only  of  God  and  of 
man,  and  their  mutual  relations;  on  God's 
part,  of  love,  grace,  and  fellowship  or  oneness 
with   us    (coming   down)  —  and   on   our   part 


116  Sermon  at  Sewanee 

(going  up)  of  faith,  hope,  and  love  that  make 
us  one  with  Him.  Our  Lord  uttered  no  new 
word,  gave  no  new  commandment,  even  insti- 
tuted no  new  sacrament  —  water  and  bread 
and  wine  were  already  in  themselves  not  only 
symbols  or  signs,  but  instruments  and  agents 
of  birth  and  life.  He  took  all  the  old  things  as 
they  were,  and  He  made  them  all  living  and 
new.  When  He  took  His  disciples  up  with 
Him  into  the  very  high  mountain,  it  was  not 
really  in  Himself,  but  only  to  them  that  He 
was  transfigured.  They  saw  Him  as  the  sun 
and  His  raiment  as  the  light;  they  heard  words 
from  heaven,  claiming  Him  for  God  and 
declaring  Him  to  man.  But  their  so  seeing 
and  hearing  was  only  through  the  exaltation 
of  their  own  spiritual  selves  and  faculties. 
Jesus  was  always  so,  if  their  senses  could  but 
have  perceived  it.  We  do  indeed  live  only  in 
our  supreme  moments.  Things  are  monoto- 
nous, dull,  dead  enough,  day  after  day,  perhaps 
year  after  year,  until  somehow  we  are  taken  up 
—  let  me  say,  however,  that  we  are  never  taken 
up,  except  as  also,  with  all  our  spiritual  co- 
operation, we  take  ourselves  up  —  into  the 
exceeding  high  mountain,  and  there  all  our 
world  becomes  transfigured  before  us.     "Old 


Sermon  at  Sewanee  117 

things  are  passed  away:  behold  all  things  are 
become  new."  Mind,  not  all  new  things  have 
become,  or  come  to  pass,  but  all  things,  the 
old  things,  have  become  new.  God  and  heaven 
are  everywhere  and  always  here  if  we  could 
but  see  them;  but  alas!  almost  nowhere,  and 
so  seldom  here,  because  so  few  of  us  can  see 
them,  and  we  so  seldom. 

How  is  it  that  our  Lord  Himself  could  live 
so  continuously  and  so  high?  I  am  speaking 
of  Him  humanly;  and  speaking  so,  we  must 
remember,  however,  that  He  had  His  deep 
places  as  well  as  His  high.  His  darkness  as  well 
as  light,  His  desertions  and  emptiness  as  well  as 
His  exaltations  and  fulness.  His  descents 
into  hell  as  well  as  His  ascents  into  heaven. 
But  still,  how  could  our  Lord  walk  as  con- 
tinuously as  He  did  upon  the  mountain  tops, 
with  such  deep  waters  and  desert  places,  such 
Gethsemanes  and  Calvaries  always  beneath 
His  feet?  We  must  look  for  very  old  and 
simple  and  human  answers  if  we  would  know 
our  Lord  as  He  came  to  be,  and  was,  the  Way, 
the  Truth,  and  the  Life  for  us.  It  is  because, 
what  time  He  could  spare  from  the  valleys, 
ministering  to  the  multitudes,  going  about 
doing  good,  He  was  wont  to  spend  upon  the 


118  Sermon  at  Sewanee 

mountains,  drawing  breath  and  strength  and 
life  from  God. 

Let  me  then  state,  or  restate,  my  proposi- 
tion and  afterward  draw  from  it  one  or  more 
corollaries.  The  proposition  is  that  we  do  not 
want  any  new  outward  truth  or  law  or  scheme 
in  itself,  but  only  a  new,  and  ever  new,  inward 
relation,  or  relation  of  ourselves  to  the  ever- 
old,  ever-new  truth.  We  want  the  spiritual 
art  and  science  of  a  self -renewing  and  self-sus- 
taining faith  and  hope  and  love.  The  Jesus 
who  was  transfigured  upon  the  Mount  is  He 
who  is  the  same  yesterday,  and  today,  and 
forever.  The  subject  of  conference  in  the 
Transfiguration  was  the  old  story  of  the  Cross. 
They  spake  of  His  decease  which  He  should 
accomplish  at  Jerusalem.  "I  determined," 
says  St.  Paul,  "to  know  nothing  among  you 
save  Jesus  Christ,  and  Him  crucified."  If  we 
cannot  get  high  enough,  often  enough,  to  get 
and  keep  these  truths  illuminated  and  glorified 
in  our  minds  and  hearts  and  lives,  we  must  be 
content  to  remain  in  the  dark.  For  what  is 
Jesus  Christ  but  God  in  us  and  we  in  God.^^ 
And  what  is  the  Cross  but  the  actual  process 
by  which  all  that  is  not  God  dies  in  us,  and  all 
that  is  lives  and  grows  in  us.^^    And  what  other 


Sermon  at  Sewanee  119 

end  or  content  can  there  be  to  our  faith,  hope, 
and  love? 

The  trouble  to  which  we  are  ever  coming  back 
is  that  we  cannot  keep  the  flame  burning  more 
steadily  in  us,  that  individuals,  communities, 
churches,  the  Church  of  Christ  should  so  live, 
and  so  need  to  live,  in  mere  occasional  re- 
awakenings  and  revivals.  At  least,  it  is  a 
blessing  and  a  comfort  to  us  to  know  that  it  is 
only  our  own  infirmity  that  it  is  so;  it  is  some- 
thing to  have  discovered,  and  to  be  able  to 
hold  fast  to  the  discovery,  that  when  we  are 
at  our  best,  and  just  in  proportion  as  we  are  at 
our  best,  we  know  the  truth  and  know  it  to 
be  the  truth;  and  equally,  that  when  we  are 
in  the  truth,  and  in  proportion  as  we  are  so,  it 
gives  us  all  the  promised  power  to  be  at  our 
best.  The  power  of  the  truth  in  that  sense  to 
"make  us  free"  is  its  divine  credential  to  us. 
We  are  very  finite  beings,  entrusted  with  and 
handling  infinite  forces.  The  omnipotence  of 
God  is  at  our  puny  disposal;  His  eternal  love. 
His  infinite  grace.  His  perfect  fellowship  and 
oneness  with  us  are  ours  to  command.  "All 
things  are  ours"  if  we  will  but  take  them  and 
use  them.  God  does  not  give  piecemeal  or 
half-way;    His  very  kingdom  and  throne  are 


120  Sermon  at  Sewanee 

theirs  who  will  take  it;  He  invites  us,  in  Jesus 
Christ,  to  occupy  it  with  Him,  and  offers  as 
well  as  bids  us  to  be  perfect,  even  as  He  is 
perfect.  We  have  no  other  end  or  goal  than 
God  Himself.  We  are  very  finite  beings  en- 
trusted with  infinite  forces;  let  us  not  be  too 
much  disheartened  that  they  do  not  work 
infinitely  in  us,  that  we  handle  them  very 
crudely;  we  are  trying  and  learning  to  drive 
the  chariot  of  the  sun.  At  the  same  time,  let 
us  never  cease  to  aim  at  and  labor  for  their 
perfect  handling,  the  straight  and  true  driving. 
If  it  be  true  that  we  do  live,  if  only  in  our 
supreme  moments,  is  not  every  moment  in 
which  we  have  so  lived  a  new  and  sufficient 
proof  to  us  of  the  eternal  and  infinite  reality 
of  the  Life  Indeed  .^^  —  and  a  new  and  com- 
pelling incentive  to  us  to  live  it,  though  it 
take  us  forever,  and  we  have  to  pass  through 
deaths  and  resurrections,  to  do  so?  How  much 
longer  and  greater  a  thing  is  life  than  we  know 
or  think!  In  the  meantime,  the  fact  that 
even  our  Lord,  in  the  needful  and  inevitable 
infirmity  of  our  present  humanity,  had  moments 
in  which  He  needed  to  know  anew  that  He  was 
the  Son  of  God,  that  He  had  to  learn  afresh 
upon  the  very  cross  that  there  is  no  such  thing 


Sermon  at  Sewanee  121 

as  a  divine  forsaking,  though  so  often  there  so 
seems  to  be,  ought  to  teach  us  how  to  have 
faith  in  even  our  darkest  hours,  and  hope  when 
we  are  faintest  and  farthest  off. 
,  All  the  new  things,  all  the  modern  ismSf  of 
/  Christianity  that  have  life  in  them,  as  many 
/  of  them  have,  are  but  broken  fragments  of  the 
Truth  that  is  One  and  is  ever  the  Same.  While 
our  sects  and  our  parties  live  by  the  truth  that 
is  in  them  and  that  is  vital  in  them,  they  are 
but  too  apt  to  live  also  in  a  deadly  competition 
with  other  truths  as  true  as  they,  and  so  in 
fatal  detriment  to  the  whole  and  the  wholeness 
of  truth.  The  course  of  truth  and  of  life,  with 
beings  such  as  we  are,  never  can  move  cen- 
trally and  evenly,  wholly  and  altogether.  It  is 
always  one  side  or  some  part  of  it  that  is  in 
motion  or  in  action,  and  that  too  often  in  a 
way  to  incur  the  misunderstanding  and  resist- 
ance of  the  other  parts.  There  is  always  fault 
on  both  sides:  the  new,  renewed,  or  revived 
side  of  the  truth  that  is  in  action  is  so  apt  to 
narrow  its  outlook  and  vision  to  the  restricted 
field  of  its  immediate  interest  and  attention,  and 
then  to  become  exclusive,  intolerant,  and  arro- 
gant toward  all  other  views  or  conceptions. 
The  side  or  sides  that  are  not  in  action,  or  in 


122  Sermon  at  Sewanee 

the  movement,  are  not  as  appreciative  of,  or 
as  hospitable  to,  the  revived  truth  and  Hfe  in 
the  new  movement  as  they  ought  to  be  —  and 
then  they  proceed  to  lower  their  own  life  by 
becoming  to  the  "party"  in  progress  an  equally 
mere  party  in  opposition. 

The  principle  of  competition,  of  antagonistic, 
divisive,  separative,  of  hateful,  hating,  and 
deadly  competition,  has  been  prevailing  in 
Christianity  just  as  much  as  in  our  earthly  life 
and  business.  The  times  are  changing,  and 
the  call,  the  appeal,  comes  to  us  from  every 
source  and  direction  —  comes  to  us  Christians, 
to  show  the  way,  the  better  way,  among  our- 
selves, in  our  own  relations  with  one  another, 
of  love  and  mutual  understanding  and  peace- 
ful and  fruitful  cooperation. 

We  have  been  here  now  nearly  the  week  — 
our  week  together.  I  think  I  have  seen  every- 
thing we  have  done  and  heard  everything  we 
have  said.  I  have  looked  and  listened  with 
very  sensitive  and  interested  and  anxious 
organs,  with  every  sense  alert.  We  who  are 
gathered  here  are  of  every  sort  and  of 
all  sorts  as  to  our  natural  and  acquired 
attitudes  toward  truth  and  life;  we  represent 
all  the  sides  and  aspects  of  faith  and  opinion; 


Sermon  at  Sewanee  123 

we  have  all  the  allowable  differences  among 
ourselves.  In  all  this  conference  and  in 
all  our  personal  association  I  have  not  heard 
one  note,  I  have  not  detected  one  tone  that 
did  not,  or  could  not,  carry  me  back  behind 
all  our  differences  to  the  one  theme  that  has 
occupied  all  our  thoughts,  filled  all  our  hearts, 
and  been  upon  all  our  tongues  to  the  exclusion 
of  everything  else  —  The  Life  —  the  Life  that 
was  lived,  that  lived,  for  us  —  that  lives  in  us, 
and  in  which  alone  we  live.  In  the  truest  sense 
we  have  gone  back  to  Christ,  back  behind 
everything  else,  to  Christ,  'Who  is  our  Life. 

We  stand  indeed  today  together  upon  an 
exceeding  high  mountain  —  upon  this  moun- 
tain, not  only  as  itself  transfigured,  but  as 
itself  no  less  a  Mount  of  Transfiguration. 
It  is  our  Lord  Himself  Who  has  brought 
us  up  hither.  And  we  have  been  talking 
with  Him  and  with  one  another  about  Him. 
We  have  seen  His  face  as  the  sun,  and  His 
vesture  whiter  than  any  fuller  or  fuller's 
soap  on  earth  could  whiten  it.  All  our  talk  has 
been  of  Him,  of  the  decease  that  He  accom- 
plished for  us  at  Jerusalem,  of  the  life  that  He 
lives  with  us  and  in  us  now  and  forever. 


vn 

LIBERTY  AND  AUTHORITY  IN 
CHRISTIAN  TRUTH 

T^ISCIPLINE  versus  freedom;  repression 
•^^  versus  persuasion,  education,  and  pa- 
tience; exclusion  versus  the  most  generous  and 
widest  inclusion;  these  are  all  alternative  ways 
and  means  to  a  common  end  in  Christianity, 
the  end  of  agreement  in  truth  and  unity  in 
life.  And  they  are  contrasts  that  are  in  the 
air,  that  are  finding  reflection  and  expression 
in  the  highest  places  of  the  religious  thought 
and  life  of  the  day.  We  have  heard  recently 
from  a  prominent  English  high-churchman 
such  a  declaration  as  the  following  on  one  side 
of  the  alternatives  stated:  "The  principle  of 
force  or  coercion  is  wrong.  What  we  really 
care  about  in  England  is  liberty.  The  glory 
of  the  Church  of  England  is  that  she  unites 
historic  catholicity  with  liberty  and  progress. 
She  has  stretched  the  utmost  limit  of  toleration 
in  leaving  her  children  to  say  what  they  would, 

125 


126  Liberty  and  Authority 

and  to  write  what  they  would,  and  to  do  what 
they  would.  She  has  no  Index  and  no  Inquisi- 
tion. One  extreme  after  another  has  worked 
itself  out  in  her  midst,  and  lost  its  sting,  and 
left  its  contribution." 

There  is  everything  in  the  situation  of  the 
Church  today  to  set  us  thinking  seriously 
along  this  line.  If  there  is  wisdom  and  reason 
in  religious  toleration  in  general,  there  is  the 
same  for  that  toleration  within,  as  well  as  with- 
out, the  Church.  The  Church  should  stretch 
her  toleration  to  its  utmost  limit.  The  writer 
quoted  above  means  that  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land ought  to  include  within  itself  the  extremes 
of  Catholic  and  of  Protestant  Christianity. 
The  Church  of  Jesus  Christ  ought  to  bear  in 
her  bosom  all  who  call  themselves  Christians. 

It  is  not  that  Christian  truth  and  Christian 
life  are  not  definite  and  determined  things.  It 
is  not  that  unity  is  not  an  essential  note  in 
Christianity.  It  is  that  unity  is  so  essential 
and  so  necessary  a  thing  in  Christianity  that  it 
must  not  be  sacrificed  to  the  demands  of  an 
impossible  uniformity;  that  the  limits  of  uni- 
formity must  be  stretched  to  their  utmost  in 
the  interest  of  even  the  lowest  practicable  unity. 
Why,  so  far  as  my  own  willingness  goes,  shall 


In  Christian  Truth  127 

I  not  be  visibly  as  well  as  invisibly  in  the  one 
body  of  Christ  with  every  devout  Catholic 
and  every  devout  Protestant;  and  with  not  only 
every  devout  Christian,  but  every  one  who  calls 
himself  Christian?  The  point  is  that  the  unity 
and  the  devoutness  so  much  to  be  desired  will 
much  more  certainly  be  attained  by  inclusion 
in  the  Church  as  the  divine  way  and  means  to 
them  than  by  exclusion  from  the  Church  until 
they  have  been  otherwise  acquired.  Extremes 
will  reconcile  themselves,  or  will  work  them- 
selves out,  lose  their  sting,  and  leave  their  con- 
tribution if  recognized  and  recognizing  their 
common  right  within  the  Church;  while  if 
driven  out,  or  if  each  claims  only  its  own  exclu- 
sive right  within  the  Church,  the  thing  empha- 
sized and  developed  will  be  only  their  difference 
and  not  their  unity.  It  might  be  alleged  that 
often  differences  are  more  bitter  in  union  than 
in  separation.  That  is  only  because,  in  the 
theory  or  kind  of  the  union,  only  one  side  has 
the  right  of  existence  within  it,  and  each  thinks 
the  other  ought  to  be  excluded.  Change  the 
theory  or  kind  of  union,  and  the  two  sides 
will  not  only  be  more  at  peace  in  their  differ- 
ence, but  will  lose  their  difference  in  a  nearer 
approach  to  unity. 


128  Liberty  and  Authority 


THE   ONLY   SPIRITUAL   UNITY   IS   THAT 
OF   FREE   CONSENT 

Agreement  in  truth  and  unity  in  life,  at-one- 
ment  with  God  and  with  one  another,  are  the 
end  and  the  task  of  Christianity.  The  only 
question  about  them  is.  How  are  they  best  and 
soonest  to  be  attained?  As  an  historical  fact, 
the  day  of  coercion  in  all  its  forms  is  past. 
Civil  coercion  in  matters  of  religion  has  ceased 
—  except,  perhaps,  as  where  a  national  Church 
is  still  bound  by  law  to  established  terms  of  a 
too  narrow  conformity.  Ecclesiastical  coercion 
exists  only  in  the  form  of  a  too  rigid  or  sec- 
tarian binding  of  faith,  under  penalty  of  exclu- 
sion; and  this  is  giving  way  except  under  the 
most  conservative  and  reactionary  conditions. 
Whither  are  we  tending,  and  what  substitute 
for  coercion  has  the  future  to  offer  us?  In  the 
paramount  interest  of  rehgious  unity,  what 
have  we  to  hope  from  freedom  versus  discipline, 
patience  and  persuasion  versus  repression,  inclu- 
sion versus  exclusion?  Is  it  a  true  conclusion  of 
experience  that  to  the  unity  of  the  spirit,  force 
or  compulsion  in  any  form  is  a  false  way? 
Have  we  made  the  discovery  that  only  through 


In  Christian  Truth  129 

freedom,  with  all  its  doubts  and  dangers,  can 
men  be  really  or  truly  brought  to  that  whose 
sole  worth  or  value  consists  in  its  being  vol- 
untary and  personal?  What  seems  to  confront 
us  as  a  new  guide  to  the  unity  of  the  future  is 
this  principle,  at  once  theoretical  and  practical, 
that  the  only  spiritual  unity  or  agreement  is 
that  of  free  consent;  and  that  in  spiritual 
matters  men  will  the  sooner  and  the  better 
agree  just  in  proportion  as  they  are  not  forced, 
as  they  are  free  to  agree. 

I  attach  the  very  first  importance  to  the 
question  and  to  the  cause  of  Christian  unity. 
I  believe  it  to  be  of  the  essence  of  Christianity. 
And  I  believe  not  only  in  its  necessity  but  in 
its  practicability.  It  is  folly  to  assume  that 
in  this  highest  sphere  of  the  spirit,  and  here 
alone,  there  is  no  such  thing  possible  as  a  real, 
practical  agreement  of  truth  and  unity  of  life. 
The  only  question  is  the  right  way  to  it.  We 
have  it,  or  are  more  and  more  getting  it,  in  all 
other  spheres.  With  all  our  diversities,  we  are 
members  of  one  community  or  social  system, 
one  state,  one  nation.  We  have  together  com- 
mon sense,  common  science,  common  morality, 
common  patriotism,  common  humanity.  And 
we  all  have  them,  with  an  only  comparative 


130  Liberty  and  Authority 

more  or  less,  better  or  worse.  So  far  as  we 
have  them  more  and  better,  we  are  practically 
in  agreement  and  at  one  in  them.  So  it  might 
be  and  should  be  in  the  matter  of  religion;  in 
proportion  as  we  have  it  more  and  better,  there 
is  no  reason  why  we  shall  not  approximate  a 
deeper  agreement  and  a  truer  unity  in  it  if 
only  we  feel  the  necessity  and  eliminate  the 
obstacles  of  unity. 

The  lines  that  beckon  us  in  the  future  are 
new  and  confessedly  more  diflScult  than  those 
we  have  followed  in  the  past,  just  as  the  dangers 
and  pains  of  manhood  and  self-direction  are 
greater  than  those  of  childhood  and  the  direc- 
tion of  others.  The  perils  of  freedom  and  the 
risks  and  insecurities  of  a  unity  or  agreement 
by  consent  may  well  appall  us,  but  they  have 
to  be  faced  and  can  be  wisely  reckoned  with 
only  as  a  necessary  part  of  the  hard,  because 
high,  problem  of  human  life  and  progress.  Let 
us  draw  the  matter  nearer  home  to  ourselves 
and  ponder  some  of  the  growing-pains  of  our 
own  present  spiritual  life  as  individuals  and  as 
a  Church. 


In  Christian  Truth  131 

IF  NO  FREEDOM  OF  ERROR  WITHIN  THE  CHURCH, 
THEN  NO  FREEDOM  OF  TRUTH 

As  individually  and  collectively  we  progress 
further  and  rise  higher,  it  becomes  more  and 
more  imperative  and  apparent  that  our  agree- 
ment with  the  truth  shall  be  our  own  agreement 
with  the  truth  and  our  unity  with  life  our 
own  unity  with  life.  The  truth  and  the  life 
come  to  us  as  not  our  own,  but  they  must 
become  our  own.  That  which  in  the  beginning, 
at  our  baptism,  our  conJBrmation,  even  our 
ordination,  we  accepted  and  bound  ourselves 
to  by  solemn  vows  was  never  as  yet  wholly 
our  own,  but,  in  even  greater  part,  only  the 
Church's  truth  and  life.  We  took  with  them, 
however,  the  obligation  to  make  them  ever 
more  and  more  and  wholly  our  own.  A  truth 
and  life  which  are  only  the  Church's  and  are 
not  in  actual  and  active  process  of  becoming 
our  own  and  wholly  our  own,  are  much  worse 
than  nothing  to  us;  a  salvation  which  does  not 
save  becomes  our  condemnation.  How  are  we 
to  go  about  making  these  things,  the  truth 
and  the  life  of  Christianity,  our  individual  and 
personal  own?  How  otherwise  than  by  the 
very  process  by  which  the  Church  itself,  as  a 


132  Liberty  and  Authority 

whole,  formulated  its  truth  and  shaped  its  life 
in  the  beginning  —  namely,  by  such  a  breadth 
and  freedom  of  Christian  experience  and  experi- 
ment as,  while  it  gave  occasion  and  gave  rise 
to  every  possible  error  or  mistake,  at  the  same 
time,  as  over  against  these,  enabled  Chris- 
tianity to  come  to  a  knowledge  and  under- 
standing of  itself.  If  you  say  that  one  shall 
make  no  mistakes,  shall  fall  into  no  errors, 
then  you  say  that  he  shall  not  know  the  truth 
for  himself  nor  live  a  life  that  is  his  own.  If 
you  say  that  he  must  go  out  of  the  Church  to 
make  his  mistakes  or  exploit  his  errors,  then 
you  have  legislated  that  within  the  Church 
one  must  live  a  life  that  is  not  his  own;  for  we 
cannot  make  even  the  Church's  life  our  own 
unless  we  are  free  in  doing  so.  If  there  is  no 
freedom  of  error  within  the  Church,  then  there 
is  no  freedom  of  truth. 

DOGMA  MUST  NOT  ONLY  HAVE  WON  CONSENT, 
BUT  IT  MUST  BE  ABLE  TO  RETAIN  CONSENT 

Let  us  see  what  is  meant  on  both  sides  when 
we  say  that  it  is  the  glory  of  the  Church  that 
she  unites  historic  catholicity  with  liberty  and 
progress.  We  mean,  on  the  one  hand,  of 
course,  that  there  has  been  from  the  beginning 


In  Christian  Truth  133 

a  life  of  the  Church  as  a  whole  which  may 
be  distinguished  from  that  of  any  individual 
member  of  the  Church.  The  collective  or 
organic  life  of  the  Church  is  properly  mani- 
fested in  a  continuity  and  catholicity  of  truth, 
of  order,  of  worship,  and  of  mission.  It  is 
absurd  to  say  that  Christian  truth  and  Chris- 
tian life  as  a  whole  are  not  suflficiently  definite 
and  determined  things  to  constitute  a  basis  of 
practical  unity  and  concord  if  only  our  con- 
ception of  unity  be  broad  enough,  like  that  of 
the  family  or  the  State  or  many  other  social 
institutions,  to  include  as  wide  a  diversity  as 
is  necessary  to  the  healthy  vitality  of  human 
life.  If  we  say  that  the  widest  toleration  and 
the  most  perfect  freedom  are  necessary  con- 
ditions of  ultimate  truth  and  complete  life, 
can  we  possibly  turn  around  and  assert  that 
these  cannot  exist  within  the  Church  which 
is  the  most  catholic  of  institutions,  the  divine 
institution  of  universal  truth  and  life?  The 
Church  must  have  its  own  definite  body  or 
system  of  catholic  truth  and  its  own  clear 
principle  and  rule  of  catholic  life,  and  it  must 
believe  that  these  are  impossible  of  attainment 
only  as  it  is  attempting  what  ought  not  to 
be  attained.     There  is  a  catholic  truth  and  a 


134  Liberty  and  Authority 

catholic  life  of  Christianity.  Nearly  two  thou- 
sand years  of  Christian  experience  have  not 
passed  without  settling,  determining,  and  estab- 
lishing anything,  without  accumulating  and 
consolidating  a  body  of  verified  fact,  of  com- 
mon sense  and  general  consent,  in  the  world 
of  the  spiritual  any  more  than  in  the  world  of 
the  natural.  I  make  no  more,  and  no  less, 
claim  for  spiritual  than  for  natural  or  scientific 
dogma,  that  which  has  passed  into  common 
consent  and  become  a  part  of  our  common 
sense.  The  Church  would  stultify  itself  if  down 
to  the  present  it  claimed  nothing  as  essential, 
necessary,  and  determined  in  Christianity. 

To  the  realization  and  preservation  of  the 
ideal  of  a  practical  unity  of  historic  catholicity 
with  real  liberty  and  progress  of  truth  and  life 
let  us  see  then  what  is  necessary.  We  shall 
have,  in  one  way,  to  make  a  wide  and  recog- 
nized distinction  between  the  historic  organic 
faith  and  life  of  the  Church  as  a  whole  and 
the  faith  and  life  demanded  of  its  individual 
members  —  and  even  more  especially  of  those 
who  do  its  original  thinking  and  living.  The 
Church  represents  an  organic  product,  a  uni- 
versal resultant,  the  consent  of  the  climes  and 
the  ages,  the  spiritual  common  sense  of  Chris- 


In  Christian  Truth  135 

tendom.  You  deny  Christianity  as  a  depart- 
ment of  human  life  if  you  deny  it  a  body 
of  cathohc  dogma  in  faith  and  morals.  The 
Church  must  stand  for  the  accumulation  and 
organization  of  that  which  is  common,  that 
which  has  passed  into  consent  and  agreement, 
has  become  res  adjudicata,  as  over  against  the 
infinite  diversities  and  vagaries  of  individual 
Christians. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  must  remember  that 
catholic  truth  or  consent  itself  was,  and  could 
have  been,  the  outcome  or  resultant  of  only 
the  very  utmost  diversity,  which  means  freedom 
of  thought  and  experience  at  the  first.  It  is  a 
recognized  fact  that  catholic  truth  was  formu- 
lated only  over  against  and  in  conflict  with 
every  possible  kindred  error.  If  its  life  con- 
sists still  in  its  being  the  truth,  its  continued 
living  depends  upon  its  continuous  power  to 
affirm  and  maintain  itself  against  every  form 
of  opposing  error.  The  moment  catholicity 
becomes  only  a  victory  of  the  past,  no  longer 
needing,  and  therefore  by  consequence  losing 
its  power,  to  defend  and  maintain  itself  in  the 
present,  in  that  moment  it  begins  to  become  a 
mere  fossil  or  fetich  —  a  dead  form,  resting 
for  acceptance  upon  an  authority  external  to 


136  Liberty  and  Authority 

itself  and  quite  distinct  from  the  exercise  of 
its  own  vitality  and  activity.  There  is  no  real 
rest  but  in  continuously  accomplished  labor; 
there  is  no  peace  but  in  ever  newly  won  vic- 
tory; there  is  no  living  truth  but  in  the  per- 
petually renewed  conquest  of  opposing  error. 
Dogma  must  not  only  have  approved  itself  and 
won  consent;  it  must  continue  to  approve  itself 
and  be  able  to  retain  consent. 

THE   church's   freedom   AND    PROGRESS 

Therefore,  while  the  Church  must  ever  main- 
tain and  represent  the  unity  and  continuity  of 
truth  and  life,  must  resist  change  until  it  can 
win  her  own  catholic  consent,  and  must  stand 
for  the  highest  tribunal  and  authority  possible 
for  us,  it  must  for  its  own  life  do  this  alongside, 
and  in  a  real  tolerance  of,  the  utmost  liberty 
and  diversity,  the  always  possible  and  often 
actual  mistakes  and  contradictions  of  her  in- 
dividual members  —  and  most  so,  I  repeat,  of 
her  most  originally  and  energetically  thinking 
and  living  members.  Our  baptism,  our  con- 
firmation, our  ordination  successively  and  pro- 
gressively bind  us  in  a  growing  loyalty  to  the 
faith  and  Hfe  of  the  Church.  They  do  not 
bind  us  to  a  mechanical  and  necessary  making 


In  Christian  Truth  137 

these  our  own;  for  they  can  never  in  that  way 
really  be  made  our  own;  they  can  become  so 
only  in  the  free  use  and  exercise  of  our  own 
reason  and  will.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  there  is 
nothing  distinctively  human  in  life,  nothing 
rational,  free,  or  personal,  that  we  do  not 
receive  and  accept  as  not  our  own  but  the 
general,  long  before  we  are  capable  of  mak- 
ing it  personally  our  own.  The  Church  is  no 
exception;  we  accept  or  receive  it  at  first  as 
the  actually  existent  accredited  mind  and  voice 
and  authority  of  organized  Christianity.  We 
accept  it  as  we  accept  the  family,  the  State, 
as  we  accept  the  common  sense,  the  common 
culture,  the  common  life,  of  which  we  are 
products  and  parts.  Not  one  individual  in  a 
thousand  is  competent  to  set  up  himself  against 
the  common  —  the  common  experience,  the 
combined  wisdom,  which  mostly  shapes  and 
determines  us  all. 

But  nothing  in  this  world,  not  even  the 
Church,  is  in  an  absolute  sense  infallible  and 
irreformable.  The  Wliole  World,  the  quod 
semper,  quod  uhique,  et  quod  ah  omnibus,  the 
Church,  is  only  relatively  or  practically  infal- 
lible, irreformable  because  there  is  nothing 
higher  to  reform  it  except  its  own  higher  self 


138  Liberty  and  Authority 

convinced  and  consenting.  It  is  not  impossible, 
however,  that  the  world  or  the  Church  shall 
out  of  itself  produce  one  at  some  one  point 
greater  than  itself  and  capable  of  correcting  and 
amending  it,  or  of  raising  it  higher  than  itself. 
There  is  nothing  theoretically  or  actually  im- 
possible in  an  Athanasius  in  the  right,  contra 
mundum  or  contra  ecclesiam.  Indeed  it  is  just 
in  this  that  consists  the  fact  of  the  Church's 
life  and  the  possibility  of  the  Church's  freedom 
and  progress.  The  Church  that  does  not  hold 
itself  and  keep  itself  open  to  conviction  and 
correction  from  within  itself  is  not  a  living 
Church.  And  it  can  do  so  only  by  keeping  up 
the  freedom  and  persistence  of  thought  and 
knowledge  within  itself.  If  one  should  arise 
who  is  in  fact  raised  up  and  qualified  to  amend 
or  correct  the  common  sense,  the  common 
truth,  or  the  common  life  of  the  Church  or  of 
the  whole  world,  he  ought  to  find  a  Church 
or  a  world  ready  to  be  convinced  and  to 
give  consent.  Alas!  he  never  does.  One  who 
would  change  the  common,  the  general,  or  uni- 
versal, ought,  we  might  say,  to  possess  the 
transcendent  qualification  and  call  to  do  so. 
But  the  transcendent  one  will  never  arise  in 
the  Church  in  which  the  aspiration  and  the 


In  Christian  Truth  139 

effort  to  transcend  is  not  permitted,  in  which 
the  thousand  failures  that  lay  the  foundation 
for  a  single  success  are  not  allowed  to  make 
themselves. 

NO  SURER  WAY  TO  PROPAGATE  ERROR 

THAN  TO  PROSECUTE,  SUPPRESS, 

AND  EXCLUDE  LIBERTY 

The  principle  which  needs  first  of  all  to  be 
established,  as  the  condition  of  anything  further, 
is  this:  That  as  the  holiness  of  the  Church  is 
not  compromised  or  contradicted  by  the  weak- 
nesses, the  shortcomings,  the  sins  of  its  members 
—  any  more  than  the  efficiency  of  a  hospital 
by  the  illness  of  its  patients;  so  the  truth  and 
life  of  the  Church  itself  is  not  compromised 
by  the  mistakes  and  errors  and  falsities  of  its 
individual  teachers  and  doctors.  To  say  that 
all  these  must  believe  and  teach  with  the 
practical  certitude  and  infallibility  of  the 
Church  itself  is  to  say  that  they  must  do  so 
mechanically  or  by  necessity.  The  power  to 
be  free  cannot  be  separated  from  the  right  to 
err.  Put  the  right  of  error  outside  the  Church, 
and  you  put  with  it  the  possibility  of  real 
freedom  or  of  real  truth. 

I  am  aware  that  fearless  thought  and  fear- 


140  Liberty  and  Authority 

less  action  along  the  line  of  freedom  is  no  plain 
or  easy  solution  of  the  problem  before  us.  But 
let  us  remember  that  civil  society  before  us  has 
never  lost  anything  in  the  way  of  social  unity, 
harmony,  or  peace  by  extending  the  limits  even 
to  the  utmost  of  freedom  of  individual  thought, 
speech,  and  action.  Extremes  always  work 
themselves  off  best  by  freedom  to  work  them- 
selves out.  The  best  expulsion  of  error  is 
through  the  freedom  permitted  to  it  of  self- 
exposure.  Our  end  in  view  is  not  the  licensing 
of  error,  but  the  ultimate  best,  if  not  only, 
method  of  eliminating  error  by  suffering  it  to 
meet  and  be  overcome  by  truth.  By  all  means 
let  the  Church  guard  and  preserve  her  faith, 
order,  and  discipline,  her  creeds,  her  ministry, 
and  her  worship.  But  let  her  neither  indulge 
the  weak  fear  that  these  are  really  endangered 
or  compromised  by  the  fullest  freedom  con- 
ceded to  and  exercised  by  her  members,  nor 
imagine  that  danger  or  harm  can  be  averted 
by  the  suppression  or  by  the  expulsion  of  that 
freedom.  If  our  desire  is  to  propagate  error, 
there  is  no  surer  way  than  to  prosecute,  sup- 
press, and  exclude  liberty.  Let  the  Church 
not  be  afraid  to  keep  herself  in  perpetual  ques- 
tion by  her  own  children.     If  their  question- 


In  Christian  Truth  141 

ings  be  true,  let  her  have  all  the  benefit  of  them. 
If  they  be  false,  let  her  meet  them,  and  be  able 
to  meet  and  answer  them,  with  the  truth. 

Is  there  to  be  no  limit  to  this  toleration? 
Of  course  there  must  be,  but  the  limit  will  very 
largely,  and  just  in  proportion  as  it  is  allowed 
to  do  so,  fix  itself.  In  the  Church,  at  least  as 
we  have  it,  there  is  no  uncertainty  in  the  voice 
or  in  the  expression  of  catholic  Christianity. 
And  that  voice  has  to  express  itself  with  no 
uncertain  sound  through  the  lips  of  every 
accredited  representative  of  the  Church.  If  he 
utters  it  falsely  or  deceitfully,  the  harm  or  the 
danger  is  to  him,  not  to  the  Church.  All  the 
world  knows  what  the  Church's  truth  is,  which 
he  has  accepted  the  commission  and  made  a 
solemn  promise  to  teach.  He  has  perfect 
freedom  to  resign  that  commission  and  to  with- 
draw that  promise  at  any  time,  and  it  is  a  libel 
to  assume  or  assert  that  there  is  any  body  of 
men  who  will  continue  to  exercise  the  Church's 
ministry  with  conscious  falsity  or  deceit.  If 
they  do,  their  conviction  and  penalty  will  not 
need  to  be  imposed  by  the  Church.  But  if  the 
truth  of  the  Church  is  living  and  free  truth, 
then  there  will  of  necessity  arise  men  from 
time  to  time  who,  with  all  possible  sincerity  of 


142  Liberty  and  Authority 

loyalty  and  devotion  to  the  Church,  will  find 
themselves  unable  to  make  their  own  some  one 
or  other  part  of  even  catholic  truth.  This  may 
stop  short  at  the  point  of  only  personal  inability 
to  comprehend  and  appropriate  the  truth  in 
question,  or  it  may  go  further  in  all  sincerity 
and  love  and  devotion  to  the  Church  to  wish 
and  even  to  attempt  its  correction  in  the  par- 
ticular in  question.  To  rule  this  impossible  in 
the  Church,  to  exact  of  every  one  of  her  members 
or  thinkers  or  teachers  her  own  complete  stand- 
ard and  attainment  of  catholicity,  is  to  impose 
a  law  of  mechanical  necessity  fatal  to  either 
freedom  or  life.  If  the  life  of  freedom  is  im- 
possible without  the  liability  of  error,  then  I 
say  that  the  liability  to  error  is  not  only  to  be 
tolerated,  but  to  be  desiderated  and  expected 
within  the  Church. 

THE   FEARLESS   PRINCIPLE   OF  FREEDOM 

The  present  practicability  of  acting  upon  so 
fearless  a  principle  of  freedom  depends  upon 
the  present  life  of  truth  in  the  Church,  or  the 
present  life  of  the  Church  to  the  truth.  If  we 
have  the  truth  wrapped  up  in  a  napkin  as  a 
sacred  deposit  handed  down  from  the  past,  if 
we  hold  it  now  as  the  decision  of  a  council  or 


In  Christian  Truth  143 

the  letter  of  a  creed  and  not  by  the  continuous 
self-demonstration  of  its  truth  in  itself  and  its 
meaning  and  necessity  to  us,  then  indeed  may 
our  dead  or  dormant  catholicity  be  afraid  of 
the  much  alive  and  wide-awake  heresies  that 
confront  it  as  in  the  earliest  ages.  Then  may 
we  indeed  not  know  what  to  do  with  them,  but 
rule  them  out  of  existence  in  the  Church  by 
the  letter  of  a  law  or  a  statute.  But  that  will 
not  do  nowadays.  Nothing  but  the  life  and  the 
living  thought  that  shaped  the  decisions  and 
wrought  the  creeds  can  maintain  the  decisions 
or  defend  the  creeds  now.  And  for  one,  I 
think  I  begin  to  see  that  the  impossibility  of 
extinguishing  error  by  legislation  or  banishing 
it  by  exclusion  or  of  getting  rid  of  it  in  any 
other  way  than  by  meeting  and  overcoming  it 
with  the  truth,  the  necessity  therefore  of  hold- 
ing the  truth  always  for  its  truth  and  not  for 
its  enactment  —  in  a  word,  the  principle  of  the 
freedom  of  truth,  with  a  fair  field  and  no  favor 
—  as  it  is  the  condition  of  the  Church's  own 
ever-present  life,  so  is  it  the  only  hope  of  its 
ultimate  unity  and  peace. 


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